Paradox by Remi Mortimer

NON, RIEN DE RIEN

PARADOX RĂŠmi Mortimer 2013

Ripe Digital Stock: Tinteresso Gesso

AN ARGUMENT THAT PRODUCES AN INCONSISTENCY, TYPICALLY WITHIN LOGIC OR COMMON SENSE.

INCEPTION PHILOSOPHY

10 - HOW MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A DREAM? 22 - WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? 34 - BEYOND THE EVIDENCE 42 - YOU NEVER REALLY REMEMBER THE BEGINNING OF A DREAM 50 - PARADOX OF FICTION 60 - WAYS OUT OF SKEPTICISM 72 - ESCAPING REALITY 80 - WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING 94 - ETHICS OF PLANTING IDEAS 108 - ARGUMENT OF FREE WILL 126 - DREAMING MINDS 134 - PHILOSOPHY OF TIME 150 - DO WE DREAM WHEN WE SLEEP? 162 - TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH 176 - UTOPIAN LIMBO 192 - PARADOX 216 - APPENDIX

HOW

MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A 10

DAVID KYLE JOHNSON

How much of Inception is a dream? Most people think the answer lies in an event just beyond our reach. Does the top fall at the end of the movie after the screen cuts to black? If it does, then Cobb is awake; if it doesn’t, then Cobb is still dreaming. A careful examination of the film, however, shows us that this is not the case. First of all, Cobb’s totem is extremely unreliable as a dream detector. Arthur specifically points out, when telling Ariadne about totems, that they work only to tell you that you are “not in someone else’s dream.” So even if the top falls, Cobb could still be in his own dream. Totems have this weakness because, if the dreamer knows how the totem behaves in reality, the dreamer could dream that it behaves that way; and obviously the owner of a totem knows how it behaves in reality. This is why you don’t want anyone else to touch your totem. If anyone gets a hint of how it is supposed to behave, they could dream that it behaves that way, and then your totem couldn’t tell you that you are not in their dream world. Despite all this, Cobb tells Ariadne, specifically, how his totem works. When she asks if the concept of a totem was his idea, Cobb says, “No… it was Mal’s actually… this one was hers. She would spin it in the dream [and] it would never topple. Just spin and spin.” So the top can’t tell Cobb that he is not in Ariadne’s dream; she knows how it works. And in fact, since she is the architect of all the dream layers in the inception, couldn’t she have (even inadvertently) worked the law “All tops fall” into the very physics of the dreams she designed? How could spinning his top ever tell Cobb that he has left the dream layers of the inception? And wait… what was that? Look at that quote again. The totem was Mal’s? Well that’s just great! Sure, Cobb thinks Mal is dead; and if she is, then he doesn’t have to worry about being in her dream. But Cobb thinks she’s dead because he believes the world in which Mal threw herself from the window ( the real world ) is real. The only way he could come to that conclusion, however, is by spinning the top and watching it fall—but wouldn’t that be circular reasoning?

Besides, who doesn’t know that tops fall after they are spun? We have no idea how Arthur’s die is weighted, or how Ariadne’s chess piece is supposed to work. But if Cobb spun his top in anyone’s dream, wouldn’t they dream that it fell? So sure, if the top did keep spinning, after the screen went black, that would tell us Cobb is still dreaming. But the top falling wouldn’t tell us anything! This line of reasoning brings up another problem. Forget the end of the film. Think about the beginning and the real world that most of the first half of the movie takes place in—the world where Mal jumps out the window, Cobb is a fugitive, the inception is planned, and the main characters meet. Think about when Cobb and Mal first reentered this world, after leaving Limbo. How could they tell it was real? The top couldn’t help, since they both knew how it works; either one of them could have been the dreamer. So how could they tell that world was real? The fact is, they couldn’t. There was no way to prove one way or the other. In fact, that was Cobb’s problem. There was no way to convince Mal that world was real, and that is why she ultimately threw herself from the window. Now, since that world didn’t start to crumble as soon as Mal “died” in it (like the Japanese Mansion dream started to crumble as soon as its dreamer, Arthur, died in it), it’s safe to conclude that world was not Mal’s dream. But it could still be Cobb’s dream. And if it is, Mal is not dead. She didn’t commit suicide; she was right. They were still dreaming, and she woke up. Sure, it’s possible Cobb and Mal were still dreaming—but is it reasonable to think they were? Yes! If you pay careful attention to the movie, you will see that it is ambiguous throughout. For the same reasons that the end of the movie might be a dream, the entire movie might be a dream. Let me elaborate. Whether the top keeps spinning at the end of the movie is an issue because it’s not clear whether Saito and Cobb make it all the way back to the real world, after exiting Limbo. Why is this not clear? For one thing, it’s never clear. Even when one dream ends, Cobb is always concerned that he merely dreamed that he awoke. That’s why he’s always spinning his top. But specific elements of the film give us reason to suspect that Cobb and Saito didn’t make it back. Think about this: What happens to someone when they exit Limbo? Where do they go? The two clearest examples we have are Fischer and Ariadne, who both exit Limbo by falling off a tall building. Where do they go? Not out to the real world! They

go one level up, to the third layer of the shared dream—the snow fortress. (They have to ride the kicks back up to the first layer.) So when Cobb and Saito exit Limbo, wouldn’t they go up to that third layer too? If so, wouldn’t it have been long abandoned by then? (The other characters make it back up to the first level, while Cobb and Saito’s bodies lie motionless in the van.) Given this, wouldn’t one of them have simply remade that layer based on their own expectations—to find themselves on a plane, landing in California? You might think this is inconsistent with the facts of the film, but it says nothing about what happens to someone upon arriving at an abandoned dream level, or whether or not such a thing is possible. We know, at least, that a dreamer exiting a dream layer does not necessarily make it collapse immediately; we learn this early on in the film, when Arthur exists his Japanese Mansion dream and it continues. So it is possible to inhabit a dream layer, without a dreamer. Arthur even tries to keep Saito under, to keep the dream going. If he had been successful, who knows how long that dream could have continued, or if it would have become Saito’s or Cobb’s dream. So, think again of the end of the film. If that third snow fortress dream level was empty when Saito arrived, why wouldn’t he dictate a new architecture for that level with his expectations? And, once Cobb arrived, why wouldn’t he populate it with projections of his subconscious—his team and his family? They were under very heavy sedation, and according to Cobb and Yusuf, it wasn’t going to wear off until after they spent a week on the first layer of the dream (which was six months on the second level and ten years on the third). And the other dreamers made it back up to that level before even an hour had passed in it. Even after exiting Limbo, Saito and Cobb could have almost ten years to live on that third level before the sedative even begins to wear off.

HOW MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A DREAM?

Is it reasonable to worry that Cobb and Saito didn’t make it back to the real world after exiting Limbo? Of course it’s reasonable—that’s why so many people care whether the top falls at the end of the film. But as we listen to Cobb recount his and Mal’s story to Ariadne, we realize a very similar problem comes up for them—one where we don’t even have to worry about what happens if one arrives at an abandoned dream level.

g n i k r o w re e e r e w t w p e e e ‘ W t h e r. W e co n c e a h t g n o i g t h n it ri g w o n l i , p h m ex d r e a us go p t o f a m . I ke p t e d t o . . . n a r a e e r w p d I e , e n s d o g n d p i th an und u n r e p o e w e ow ] , d e r u w o o n f b e o h m i e w L [ or h s t s a u h o e i h w c t s f n o o t c h s u b o st s i g we l re a l .’ wa s Cobb and Mal entered Limbo by experimenting with

multilayered dreaming. As Cobb recounts to Ariadne,

To exit Limbo, they laid their heads on the train tracks—and woke up on the floor of some house, hooked up to a “dream machine” (PASIV) briefcase, married with two kids. But if their exit from Limbo was like every other, that floor was only one level up—the deepest layer of a multilevel dream, just above Limbo. If so, their fifty years in Limbo was long enough for them to forget this fact, or what the real world was even like. So, even if that world is not real, it’s no wonder that Cobb believes it is. Sure, Mal believes it is a dream only because Cobb incepted the idea into her in Limbo. That doesn’t mean, though, that Mal’s belief is false. She might be right, and if she is, she didn’t commit suicide—she woke up! If the sedative Cobb and Mal used is nearly as potent as the one used on the airplane, Cobb could be stuck on that level for ten years before he even has a chance to wake up in the real world. Who knows? Cobb and Mal might not even have kids in the real world. They might not even be married; they might have been just exploring the possibility through shared dreaming.

HOW MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A DREAM?

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16 HOW MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A DREAM?

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18 HOW MUCH OF INCEPTION IS A DREAM?

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In fact, the entire movie might be a dream.

RUTH TALLMAN

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

Figuring out the “meaning” of Inception is not the same thing as figuring out how uch of the movie is a dream. The meaning question, and how it relates to the dream question, is an entirely different issue. But what philosophers have said about meaning, and how to grasp the meaning of art, can help us determine how to interpret the plot of Inception.

INTENTIONALISM Many philosophers accept intentionalism, the view that the artist’s intention determines the meaning of the artwork. But I think that such an approach fails, for three reasons. First, the intentionalist view leaves us with an epistemic (knowledge-related) problem regarding many artworks; many end up either having an unknowable meaning or no meaning at all, both of which are quite counterintuitive conclusions. Second, intentionalism forces us to understand artworks as interpretively static, when they don’t seem to be. Third, intentionalism is inconsistent with the view that the concept of art is a social convention that, properly understood, means that artworks are the collective property of the art world.

EPIS TEM

OLO

This objection stems from the problem that if the meaning of an artwork is rooted in the intention of the artist, we are left with an interpretive hole regarding many works of art. 24

This objection stems from the problem that if the meaning of an artwork is rooted in the intention of the artist, we are left with an interpretive hole regarding many works of art. Nolan tells us that he has an answer regarding Inception, but that he plans to keep it a secret. This means that if Nolan gets to set the meaning of the work, the rest of us will simply never know the “right answer” regarding the way we ought to interpret the film. Now, maybe one day Nolan will crack and give us his answer (I doubt it), but what’s worse is that many artists report that they simply did not intend any particular meaning when they created their works, arguing that their only intention was for each viewer to find her own meaning in the piece (J. R. R. Tolkien made this claim regarding The Lord of the Rings in the introduction to that work). Regardless of that intention, if artworks really obtain their meaning through artist’s endorsement, we’re forced to conclude that these works are simply meaningless, because their artists didn’t see fit to give them one. And that doesn’t seem right. Another problem is that some artists appear to change their interpretive account of their works over time, perhaps because they themselves are unsure of the meaning or perhaps because they perceive some benefit from rewriting their account (maybe to accord with a particular political agenda or to cash in on a new trend). In fact, they may even change their mind about how they think the work ought to be understood, or come to view it in a new way. (For instance, Christopher Nolan claimed in an interview that he never detected the connections between filmmaking and the dream-sharing technology in the film—the relationship has to do with simultaneous creation and observation—until it was pointed out to him by his brother.) Regardless, these types of cases raise further concerns regarding the intentionalist view. Do we really want to say that the meaning of artworks can change at the whim of the artists but that they cannot be changed for any other reason? This gives a strange amount of power to the artist and runs contrary to a social understanding of art. (We’ll talk more about that below.)

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

Not to pile on, but some works of art are of unknown authorship, making their meaning forever unknowable on this account. The gravity of this problem should be clear when you consider that many portions of the Bible—certainly a work of art, whether or not you believe it to be divinely inspired—are of unknown or disputed authorship. And even those works with known authors typically do not come packaged with an authorial account of meaning, which leaves the majority of viewers, who lack knowledge of the author’s intent, in the dark about the meaning of the work. The intentionalist view forces us to conclude that all of those viewers simply cannot know the meaning of the work or, if they do, they merely lucked into it and don’t know that they know it. The epistemic problem with the intentionalist view, then, is that many artworks—including Inception —are either meaningless or are interpretive mysteries. And this is quite counterintuitive. Most of us believe that we can derive meaning from a work, even if we do not know what interpretation the artist had in mind, and we don’t think the meaning we derive is in some sense wrong, or flawed, if it doesn’t accord with the artist’s intentions. A position that commits us to believing that most viewers cannot know the meaning of most works of art is therefore one that ought to be rejected. Setting aside the epistemic problem, even if the artist’s intended meaning were knowable in all cases, the intentionalist view would still face the problem of forcing us to the position that artworks are interpretively static. On this view, once the artist has set the meaning of the work, that meaning is fixed for the life of the artwork. This view thus denies one of the features that we tend to value about art. It is generally held that one of the marks of a great work of art is that it continues to be relevant to audiences long after its original context has faded into history, and we tend to fault works that quickly become “dated.” Sometimes modern viewers will read an interpretation into a work that the artist could not possibly have intended. There is no way that Sophocles intended for Oedipus Rex to be read with a Freudian psychoanalytic spin, but do we want to say that such an interpretation is wrong because the author didn’t intend that interpretation? On the contrary, it is typically held that the power and immediacy with which Oedipus Rex continues to hit new readers is a mark in its favor, rather than an indication that all of us today are simply involved in a huge misunderstanding of the work.

26 WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

Despite its success, it is too early to tell whether Inception will stand the test of time, and if our great-grandchildren will be arguing about whether or not the top fell. But if viewers are still watching and trying to understand this film in fifty years, it is quite reasonable to suppose that those future audiences will find meaning in the work, connecting it to events or perhaps new ways of thinking or new understandings of dreams and the subconscious that Nolan could not possibly have anticipated. Do we throw out those views as incorrect, and insist that the only way to know the work is to situate it rigidly in the context of its original creation? This runs counter to a fluid understanding of art, one that allows the audiences to impact future understandings of the work, just as the work impacts the audience’s future understanding of their world. If we value the ability of an artwork to continue to exist as a dynamic piece, immediate and powerful to ever-changing audiences, we cannot privilege the author with the ability to set the work’s meaning for all time. A third reason why we should believe that artists lack the authority to impose a singular meaning on a work stems from the very definition of art as a social convention. Some philosophers argue that artworks must be understood in relation to other artworks. This view requires a clear rejection of the intentionalist view of artwork meaning because, in this view, the meaning of a work comes partially from other works, rather than from the artist. watch Inception . We experience Pavlovian responses to ominous music, such as the “drum drum” in the introductory score of Inception —which, interestingly, is really just a slowed-down version of the song (Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”) that is used to time kicks throughout the film—because years of movie watching have primed us regarding the way we should encounter films. Think about something as basic as understanding Inception as a work of fiction in which we are invited to suspend our disbelief and suppose, for the duration of the film, that such a thing as dream-sharing is possible. This would not be the effortless transition out of everyday life that it is for us, smoothly executed as we move through the dimming aisle with our popcorn, were we not schooled in the art of film-watching.

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C . D

a n to

“In my own version of the idea of ‘what art wants,’ the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. ”

h u r

Cobb: I know what’s real. Mal: What are the distinguishing characteristics of a dream? Mutable laws of physics? Tell that to the quantum physicists. Reappearance of the dead? What about heaven and hell? Persecution of the dreamer, the creator, the messiah? They crucified Christ, didn’t they? Cobb: I know what’s real. Mal: No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces? The way projections persecute the dreamer? 30 WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?

Most people argue in support of a particular interpretation of a film by pointing to a series of events and scenes that support their position. My favorite example is an extremely subtle clue. When Cobb is explaining to Ariadne how dreams work, he mentions that, when dreaming, “we create and perceive our world simultaneously.” What is interesting about this scene is that Nolan chose to start it asynchronously. The audio for the scene starts several seconds prior to the video. Cobb begins talking as a voice-over to the previous scene, where Arthur is setting up the room in which they are dreaming. We as the audience are watching the creation of the room at the same time that we perceive the dream environment (the conversation actually taking place in the dream). Nolan appears to be giving us a visual metaphor of the phenomenon that Cobb is describing. A less subtle example comes from the conversation between Cobb and his fatherin-law, Miles. After Cobb spends some time discussing how he has found a way to come home, Miles simply responds, “Come back to reality.” If Cobb is dreaming, Miles would be speaking as a manifestation of his own subconscious, reminding him that all of his current experiences are simply a dream. Two significant visual clues involve Eames. Recall that when Cobb first meets him in Mombasa, Eames is sitting at a dice game, fiddling with (according to the script) “his last two chips.” He bets and loses them, but then he goes to cash out and “mysteriously produces two stacks of chips.” Where did they come from? Cobb’s comment (“I see your spelling hasn’t improved”), while looking at one of the chips, clearly indicates that the chips are Eames’s forgeries. But Eames didn’t have time to make new chips on his walk from the table to the cashier. It seems that, as Cobb’s “ dreamforger,” Eames has produced two stacks of forged chips, by pure will, within Cobb’s dream. Similarly, Eames supposedly lifts Fischer’s passport when they cross paths on the plane. But watch closely—he doesn’t do it. In no way does Eames reach anywhere near any of Fischer’s pockets. Yet inexplicably, after the next cut, Eames just “produces” the passport and gives it to Cobb. Is Eames “dream-forging” once again? Other people argue that the change from reality to dream happens in Yusuf’s basement when Cobb tests the drugs. The chief support for this interpretation is the fact that Saito interrupts Cobb when he is checking his top, and we don’t see it fall. To this point, we can argue that the totems are simply red herrings. Cobb can construct a reality where the top falls just as easily as one where it does not. In case this point wasn’t obvious to you, Arthur comes right out and says a totem can only tell you that you are not in someone else’s dream, since they don’t know how the totem behaves and you do. The top failing to fall would be sufficient evidence that Cobb is in a dream, but the top falling does not give us the same level of confidence that he is not in a dream. 31

BEYOND EVIDENCE THE

JASON SOUTHWORTH

What we are dealing with is the problem of underdetermination of information —there is not enough information to prove one hypothesis over the other. This is a common problem that comes up most often in the sciences. The problem arises when the available evidence adequately fits more than one hypothesis. Consider the classic example of Earth’s place in the cosmos. In ancient and medieval times, it seemed obviously true that Earth was stationary and at the center of the universe. It did seem a bit odd that the planets sometimes doubled back on themselves in orbit, but this was easily explained. Ancient thinkers suggested that the planets orbited around points that themselves were orbiting Earth—thus, you would expect to see retrograde motion every now and again. This geocentric (Earth-centered) view was first defended by Ptolemy (ca. AD 90–CA. 168), in the second century. When Copernicus (1473– 1543) came along, however, he suggested that the Sun was the center of the universe. He thought Earth was just another planet that orbited around the Sun and that retrogrades were an illusion created when Earth passed or was passed by another planet in orbit. The problem was, both Ptolemy and Copernicus made the same predictions about where you would see the planets each night, and neither made any unique observable predictions that would prove who was right. Just like the “Full ” and “Most Real” interpretations of Inception, which theory was true was underdetermined by the evidence. So how did we end up rejecting one and favoring the other?

It took some time, but the heliocentric view was eventually accepted because of its simplicity and scope. “Simplicity” here means observing the principle of parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor. The heliocentric view makes fewer assumptions—there is less “stuff” in it. To work, the geocentric model requires retrogrades, and even retrogrades on retrogrades. The whole thing is quite complex. The heliocentric model requires none of this—just elliptical orbits around the Sun. The greater “scope” of the heliocentric model means it explains more; it answers more questions, making it a more comprehensive theory. An unanswerable problem for the geocentric model was why there were no solar or lunar retrogrades when every other body orbiting Earth doubled back on itself. The heliocentric model gave us the power to solve this problem. There’s no solar retrograde because its apparent motion is caused by Earth’s rotation, and no lunar retrograde because the Moon orbits Earth.

Problem solved.

Unfortunately, the principle of parsimony is not going to help us decide between interpretations of Inception . What would it even mean for one interpretation of a movie to be simpler than another? Is it simpler to think everything takes place in one dream plane, or is it simpler to think everything Cobb believes is happening is actually happening? Which interpretation “makes fewer assumptions”? I haven’t a clue. Worse yet, Inception is a complex film, with a complex narrative structure, dealing with complex issues. A complex explanation might be appropriate. We favor simplicity in science because of the belief that simpler explanations are more likely to be true. This is not the case with fiction, however. We know writers and directors often intend complexity in their films, and in the case of Inception dream, the work was intentionally designed to be ambiguous, adding to the complexity. So we will have to look elsewhere for a reason to favor one interpretation over another.

BEYOND THE EVIDENCE

Sup p the ose s r me e are omeo ant mu ne .I lt ano g the n one iple in ives we a r, t acc it is interp erpre n un c the tat ept cle ret ion lear a a ? arg so how perso Firs rly b tion, f t, w u a t n i e s d. W he ar what ment he’ ever, hat , a gum the ntend hou sd tha nd e e t p fur i l the ad, a erson d—pr d atte nterp ent is pers o bse ret efe r), As m ’s i g n pt atio ood r nte w nt to ; in nti ably jus philos e can , or find n sh on b u t “ ’ y o oul t n is u wil jus o win phe a spe u s l tw d n ta k rs, ni a ssu ing to avail ing hat we sho ker a ng th h a m i b ’ d m et le ( sc isc u e d re . If h u c har b pos ld as e a o s , e y”— s nce c b su it s rne ad in the m ause so sho ible v me t ably d t w h as erp a e wt w we e sh ret tter we hat rsion at the at ou ith h c o s sho ave n the w f the peak an. In ld in truth ion. — o e e t r a doe t, whe t sho ak ve rgum r mea other erpre not wn t rsio n sn np e w tt the nt o t ot ma ossib hat th n of t . Afte o give rds, l ke the we stu e, we e con he ar r all, be gu cl sh if pid mis ould usion men we o st t is nly ass tak is u um es. f n e th foun aulty, ded at t . he arg In uer

Th e p r pri nci incip le p wh en le of c that as har int wil ta er it l b e m tha preta teme y. In a n t i t s m ions, t is a nuts ost h the hel mb elp we o l, f i sta interp st c har shou guou the p ul to tem ret sa rin ld ita ati tha ent cip us is n b c o d t le h nt . th it g woul Not hat . Th oose thus le sa d a ets o has ys t e the gre choo nly is is kin t is, mu hat i n d w se at r thi ltip est e s terp th esu s lts. e unk prin to th houl retat le d cip ea ind cho ion ut int le “n erp ice hor o ose ret r ati ” tha f the on, no but n usi e ng

38 BEYOND THE EVIDENCE

Ap p film lying t s, suc we he pr in c clo ess r shoul ciple se d p ath of att are cha en er th refe f r cho air, or tion t an a r inte ity w s hen rpr ice if th o cr a et s th c it e at a re is icism lear f ation interp a a s t s r ctu i hat eting ally way t of th lure. ew os T art s ma o e ee or e , in d ke c the thes k and o this the wo ludin e ,w wo q â&#x20AC;&#x153; u f g rk law est es rk s as s io h tro a nge â&#x20AC;? as in n wh ould e p t ra ay nd entio ther th mo n re i al art ey nte is res tic tin g. 39

YOU NEVER REALLY

JASON SOUTHWORTH

BEGINNING A further reason to believe that all of Inception is a comes not from

applying the principle of charity to the film, but from an expectation that Nolan and the others who helped create the film have consistent beliefs. The most interesting thing about Inception, and the reason I think it is a great film, has nothing to do with the story but with how the story is told. Nolan takes many of the stale conventions of action movies that often distract from the narrative and uses them to advance his story. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s start with the use of slow motion. For almost as long as there have been action movies, there have been slow-motion action sequences. Heroes jump, fall, punch, and shoot in slow motion. This is done to heighten suspense. The longer the slow motion, the longer our feeling of hope, fear, or expectation. The slow motion in Inception has the same effect on the audience, but it also literally indicates a difference in the passage of time. When things happen in slower motion in the upper levels of nested dreams, it is to remind the viewer that things are happening more quickly on the lower levels. For example, the van falling into the water is always shown in slow motion because everything that happens on the snow fortress level, from the time of the avalanche to when the snow fortress collapses, happens in the few seconds it takes the van to hit the water.

OF A DREAM

Another visual trope of action movies is jump-cutting, in which there are a series of quick cuts in a row, some not lasting longer than a second. While not from an action film, the most famous example of this is the shower scene in Psycho. Jump-cutting heightens action, often making things appear faster and more chaotic than they were when they were actually shot. Your mind fills in the gaps between these cuts, and you may perceive things that don’t actually happen. In Inception, however, these cuts are also used to show us what is happening in each of the dream layers at roughly the same time. Jump cuts are the only way to convey this information, as the cuts have to be short to suggest that the events are simultaneous. Most filmmakers exploit the fact that songs or pieces of scoring make us feel something viscerally. Think of the notes in Jaws that signal the shark is coming. We as viewers then see the scene in light of the feeling the music is giving us. Inception uses music not just to convey feelings but also to convey story information. When the Edith Piaf song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” plays in the background, we know that there is only a short time left in the dream. And what makes this different from Jaws is that in this case, the tone and mood are not set by our visceral reaction to the music. Rather, our conscious recognition of what the music signifies is the key, thus turning the musical convention on its head. Even more to Nolan’s credit, both the characters and the audience are aware of the significance of the music, so we are sharing in the emotional response with them. The obligatory fight scenes play a complex role in Inception. Arthur’s zero-gravity fight scene in the hotel, for example, is not just one of the most visually compelling fights in movie history, it also plays a role in the narrative. The characters are in free fall because the kick in the first dream happened earlier than expected. Since Arthur is in free fall in the first dream, there is no gravity in the second dream. Again, it looks incredible, but it isn’t just cool to look at—there is a point to it.

44 YOU NEVER REALLY REMEMBER THE BEGINNING OF A DREAM

With all that in mind, consider another cinematic convention that Nolan uses: having the audience join a scene that is already under way. This story-telling technique has been around forever, but it has been used and abused often in films since the mid-1990s, when it was popularized by Quentin Tarantino. The way it works is that rather than the viewer following a scene from the start, a cut puts the viewer in the middle of a scene or a conversation. When this is done effectively, the boring and unnecessary parts of the scene are eliminated (walking into the room, introductions, and so on), and it makes exposition more exciting because we as audience members have to play catch-up to figure out what’s going on. Inception opens in this way, with Cobb on the beach; it happens again when that scene cuts to Cobb attempting to sell Saito mental protection; and it is repeated again and again.

Knowing that the other conventions are being repurposed in service of the story and expecting consistency give us reason to prefer the interpretation that treats this technique as something that motivates the narrative, rather than just a worn-out movie trick. As Cobb tells Ariadne in her first trip to the dream world, “You never really remember the beginning of a dream . . . you always end up right in the middle of what’s going on.” So for the sake of consistency, we should see the continued use of the start-in-the-middle-of-the-scene trick as Nolan’s way to communicate something to us—that the real world is really just a dream. 45

You might be tempted to think, that the “Full Dream” hypothesis makes the movie worse, by negating the “stakes” that we care about throughout the movie. Thus, you might think that the principle of charity calls us to favor the “Most Real” hypothesis. After all, what reason do we have to care about the characters, or anything about the film for that matter, if it is all just a dream?

46 YOU NEVER REALLY REMEMBER THE BEGINNING OF A DREAM

It’s possible that the entire movie is a dream. Some critics, though, have suggested that it diminishes the movie to think that it’s all a dream. They contend that since we don’t ultimately care about what happens in our dreams, we don’t care about a movie that only depicts a dream. 47

P R D OF FICTION 50

Some critics seem to believe that only some fictional worlds can be emotionally moving (even though we know they arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t real). Before we can figure out what separates the fictional world of Inception from the fictional world of, say, Todd

Solondzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Life during Wartime (a movie that came out in the United States at the

same time as Inception and was mentioned as the right kind of movie to care about in more than one negative review of Inception), we need to consider the more basic

rad

o ox

cti f fi

the

E DR

JE ER

is Th

problem of why we care about anything that is not real.

X 51

The philosopher Colin Radford (1935–2001) explored this problem in the context of Anna Karenina. According to Radford, there seems to be a problem when we become worried about the fates of fictional characters like Anna Karenina or Dom Cobb. The problem is that our fear for Dom’s safety when he is being chased through the streets of Mombasa is a fear that he will be hurt or killed if he gets caught. Dom isn’t in any danger, though (and I don’t mean because I think he is actually asleep in some lab with a worried Mal hoping he will finally wake up). Dom is not a real person, so Dom by definition can’t be hurt. Worrying about Dom’s safety makes about as much sense as worrying about whether Santa Claus will get cancer from the hole in the ozone layer. Nonexistent entities can’t feel anything and can’t experience anything. The paradox of fiction consists of three claims that can’t all be true. Here they are illustrated using a movie-watcher’s fear upon seeing the locomotive bearing down on Cobb and company in level one of the Fischer inception:

People do not believe that the locomotive they see on the screen is a real threat because they believe that it doesn’t exist. (Let’s call this the “Nonexistence Claim.”) People

are

actually

scared

the

locomotive they see on the screen. (Let’s call this the “Fear Claim.”) Feeling fear requires a belief that the locomotive barreling down a city street is a threat to one’s safety. (Let’s call this the 52

“Threat Claim.”)

The most obvious way to get rid of the paradox is to reject the Nonexistence Claim. People sometimes refer to this as “suspension of disbelief.” When we are in the theater, we forget that we don’t believe that what is happening is real. As Radford has pointed out, though, this just doesn’t seem to be a credible response. If you believed that the locomotive was real, you should have been running out of the theater to avoid getting hit by it when it was coming at you. Besides, how does one suspend disbelief? How do you will it so that you believe something or that you no longer believe it? In order to will it, you’d have to be aware (somewhere in the back of your mind) that it wasn’t real. So Radford doesn’t want to reject the Nonexistence Claim. Yet Radford is also convinced that the Fear Claim is true. People do cry during emotional scenes in movies, which seems to be a display of genuine emotion. All that is left is the Threat Claim. Does Radford reject it? No. To support the Threat Claim, Radford gives the example of someone being told about the plight of a neighbor. As the details of the situation are described, we are moved to pity. But then imagine that we find out that the whole story is made up—that the neighbor described is made up, the circumstances never happened, and so on. Radford claims that we would immediately feel our pity dissipate on learning this. It seems, then, that we need to believe in the existence of something in order to feel for it. Since Radford accepts all three premises, he admits that he sees no solution to the problem—it’s a paradox of fiction. Because our fear at the locomotive involves a set of inconsistent beliefs, Radford states that the response is irrational. Not surprisingly, a lot of philosophers take umbrage at the idea that they are irrational if they are moved by something like Fischer’s reconciliation with his father.

PARADOX OF FICTION

We don’t experience actual emotions when we engage with fiction.

54 PARADOX OF FICTION

This may seem to be a strange view because it sounds like we are constantly playacting while we watch a movie (or read a book), but that is not what Walton means when he says we’re not genuinely afraid for Mal’s safety. Pretending that we see a woman in front of us about to jump out a window causes us to have a reaction. The pretense can get our heart rate going, cause us to shout out, or cry. According to Walton, though, this reaction is not the same as genuine fear. It is merely quasi-fear, because it has some of the features of fear but This may seem to be a strange view because it sounds like we are constantly playacting while we watch a movie (or read a book), but that is not what Walton means when he says we’re not genuinely afraid for Mal’s safety. Pretending that we see a woman in front of us about to jump out a window causes us to have a reaction. The pretense can get our heart rate going, cause us to shout out, or cry. According to Walton, though, this reaction is not the same as genuine fear. It is merely quasi-fear, because it

According to Walton, we know that Mal is not real. There is no “suspension of disbelief” where we forget that we are watching a movie in a dark theater. We know that the scene is being acted out by Marion Cotillard and Leonardo DiCaprio on a sound stage. So when we’re watching Inception we pretend that we are seeing a real confrontation between Mal and Cobb. We make believe that it’s possible to enter people’s dreams and get lost in a dream reality. It’s our ability to act as if there is a woman who thinks she is still trapped in a dream threatening to really kill herself that enables us to exhibit the behaviors that Radford confuses with real emotions.

An influential line of thought on the paradox of fiction argues that the Fear Claim is false. We don’t experience actual emotions when we engage with fiction. According to philosopher Kendall Walton, we’re not really afraid for Mal’s safety when she is dangling on a ledge. Walton, however, cannot deny that we act as if we are scared (the actions that Radford mistook for evidence of real emotions). So he needs to explain what we are experiencing when we are watching Mal on the ledge.

has some of the features of fear but is not fully experienced the way we would feel fear if we were watching a woman in real life hanging out a hotel window. After all, while a movie can provoke some reactions in its audience, we don’t do everything we would do if we were really afraid for Mal. Certainly, no one is calling 911 to report a suicide attempt. That’s just one of the most obvious examples of the difference between genuine fear and quasi-fear. If you reflect on your own experiences, you can probably detect other differences as well. While Walton’s view has persuaded a number of philosophers, it also has its staunch opponents. According to Walton’s critics, the biggest problem is that he is not very clear about what makes something an example of quasi-fear as opposed to genuine fear. The philosopher Noël Carroll offered a different take on our reaction to movies in his book The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (the paradox of fiction was one of two paradoxes he dwells upon in the book). Carroll does not deny that people are experiencing real emotions when watching a horror movie. Instead, he rejects the Threat Claim. We don’t need to believe that some real object poses an actual threat in order to provoke a reaction in the audience. Carroll argues that we can react to ideas as well as things. According to Carroll’s “thought theory” (so as to distinguish it from Walton’s “make-believe theory”), when we are watching Fischer experience a happy resolution in his relationship with his father, we react to the idea of joy that the scene presents. The idea of joy presented by the scene produces an emotion in us that is a genuine feeling. Carroll is very careful, however, to classify our reaction to the film as an example of an “art emotion.” Art emotions are still emotions, but they are emotional reactions to ideas, not to things. Imagine that Fischer is a friend of yours and you witness him finally coming to terms with all the expectations his stern father placed on him. As you see him pull the revised will and the homemade pinwheel out of the safe, you feel joy at his epiphany. Your joy would be a physical sensation directed at your friend Fischer, and it would undoubtedly have a visceral feel. Contrast that with how you feel when I tell you the story of someone who lived a long time ago and stopped living under his father’s shadow. Your joy would have a more detached, abstract quality. It would be an example of art joy.

The thought theory explains our investment in the ending of Inception. Depending on whether the totem falls or not, the viewer is presented with different ideas in the film. If the totem falls, then you could view the film as being about the importance of letting go of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s guilt. If it keeps spinning, then it might be about the tendency we have toward self-deception. We care about what the movie is depicting because it determines the appropriateness of our emotional response. Our art relief (as opposed to genuine relief) at seeing Cobb come to terms with Malâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death will seem disingenuous if it turns out that the film is meant to end with Cobb trapped in a dream.

Although he has tried to leave the movie open-ended enough for different interpretations of what happens (how much of the movie is a ), Nolan has weighed in on what he thinks the movie is about and how that is reflected in the final scene. In an interview Nolan said,

I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me—it always felt like the appropriate “kick” to me. . .. The real point of the scene—and this is what I tell people—is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing. Nolan’s emotions toward the film seem to be rooted in ideas that could affect us regardless of whether Cobb is still dreaming. Even if he doesn’t wake up, we can be moved, like Nolan, by his decision to focus on his children. At the same time, this kind of emotional response seems to rely upon the belief that things worked out in the real world . Nolan’s claim that he imposed ambiguity, and that he chooses to believe Cobb returned to his children, suggests that he finds it difficult to connect with the film without seeing it as having “really” happened.

WAYS OUT OF

JAMES.T.MILLER

The issue of whether we can know that we are not dreaming is fundamental to epistemology—the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. The possibility that Mal is right points to radical skepticism

SKEPTICISM

, the view that knowledge is impossible. Why would anyone take this position? Consider the hypothesis that you are, right now, asleep and vividly dreaming of reading this book. How would you prove this isn’t happening? You might firmly grip this book to verify it is solid, ask someone near you if you are awake, or even pinch yourself. But the very experiences these “tests” produce—the feeling of solidity, hearing the words “Yes, you are awake,” and not awaking after a pinch—can also be dreamed. So these tests do not prove anything.

But isn’t it obvious that you are awake? After all, no strange dreamlike things are happening. But of course, we have all had that dream that was just as obviously real as our waking life. We may have even considered the possibility that we were dreaming and dismissed it, because the dream was so obviously real. Of course afterward, we may have wondered how we could have thought this. But, as Cobb pointed out in the quote that begins this chapter, while dreams are happening they do not seem strange. “It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” In fact, the reason bad dreams often wake us up is that they seem real. So the non-strangeness and obvious reality of the real world cannot be used as evidence that it is in fact real. Dreams can have these same qualities. And if we can’t be sure we are even awake, what can we be sure of? Certainly not the host of other things that are less obvious than the existence of the real world—the existence of other minds, the existence of God, the ethical beliefs we hold dear. Even things like 1 + 1 = 2 are subject to doubt. You think this is true—obviously true—even true by definition. But isn’t it possible that you have been deceived by something like the Matrix into thinking that “1 + 1 = 2 is obviously true by definition,” when in reality 1 and 1 total 3? In fact, anything that is false could be dreamed to be true—so, it seems, we can be certain of nothing at all. How can we know anything? This is radical skepticism. Christopher Nolan knows that we will instinctively feel that Mal must be mad and that Cobb is sane. But radical skepticism undermines that instinct. Maybe Mal was not so crazy after all.

COGIT ERGO SUM

The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) attempted to refute

radical skepticism by establishing one piece of absolute certainty as a

foundation stone upon which all other human knowledge could be built. If he was successful, we can use his argument to eliminate our own doubts; perhaps we can even establish that Cobb was right in believing

that he was awake and that Mal was wrong in believing that she was still dreaming.

Descartes raised skeptical doubts in several ways, by realizing that his senses sometimes deceived him, that he could be dreaming, and that he

could be deceived by an evil demon (a scenario updated to virtual reality in The Matrix). For example, he knew his senses had led him astray in the

past—like when they told him that a stick placed in a cup of water was bent, when in fact it was straight. What assurance did he have that his senses were not always leading him astray?

Ultimately, Descartes realized that there was one thing he could not

doubt—his own existence. Why? Because in performing the very act

of doubting, he must exist. He cannot persuade himself that there is no world unless he exists. An evil demon cannot fool Descartes, unless he

exists to be fooled. So, “the proposition, I am, I exist , is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

If Descartes is right, each one of us can be sure of the existence of our

thoughts and ourselves. But if this is all that we can ever be sure of, what

use is it? Can it be used to prove the existence of the external world or that we are not dreaming? It would seem not. This is Mal’s problem. She

believes in her own existence, but cannot prove that she is not dreaming, and it leads her to jump out a window.

Descartes, though, believed there was a way to move beyond the

knowledge that he existed as a thinking thing. He had an idea of a perfect being, God, which he believed could not simply have been created by

his own imperfect mind. In fact, the only thing that could create such an idea was the perfect being itself. So, Descartes concluded, God, a perfect being, exists.

TO O

How does this get us knowledge of the world? If the world is not real, then Descartes is being deceived on a grand level. But if he is being deceived, that perfect being must either be doing the deceiving or at least allowing Descartes to be deceived. But a perfect being would never do either of these things because “all deception or fraud involves some imperfection.” So, Descartes concluded that what his senses tell him clearly and distinctly must be true. Since the senses incline him to believe that the world is real, belief in the existence of the world is justified. Knowledge of the world is grounded.

There are problems, however. Descartes’ argument for the existence of God relies on the supposition that something less perfect cannot create something more perfect. Descartes thinks this is clearly and distinctly true, but cannot this be doubted? Can’t we imagine a scientist creating a robot that far exceeds his own perfection? To create the idea of God, all one needs is to experience a being and something getting better. From there one could conceive of a being that cannot get better—a perfect being. In fact, many evolutionary psychologists suggest that belief in God comes from humans anthropomorphizing impersonal natural forces. Of course, they might be wrong. But in order for Descartes’ argument to work, they have to be necessarily wrong; a perfect being has to be the only possible source of such an idea. Clearly this is not the case. We can still be wrong about what we believe; we could be dreaming

or otherwise deceived. Descartes’ arguments cannot save us from the radical skepticism that Mal suffers from. So we still lack a principled reason to think that Cobb is correct.

WAYS OUT OF SKEPTICISM

Perhaps modern science can secure our knowledge of reality in a way that Descartes could not. The successes of science are apparent all around us, from the development of quantum physics to the technological advances that we enjoy. “Scientific realism” holds that science accurately describes the world and is moving toward its goal of a complete description of the true nature of reality. Since our senses broadly correlate with science and its findings, we can infer that our senses must be accessing the external world. And so, it seems, our senses are reliable—they are accessing the external world, and thus it exists. The intuition that scientific realism is correct is not enough to support a philosophical position, though. We need an argument, such as Hilary Putnam’s “no miracles” argument, roughly reconstructed as follows:

There are scientific theories that are empirically successful.

It would be a miracle if the theories were successful and not approximately true.

The best explanation of the empirical success of these theories is that the theories are at least approximately true.

Therefore, successful scientific theories are approximately true. 64

This argument suggests that because science seems to be successful, can explain and, more importantly, predict, what will happen in the world around us, then it must at least be approximately true. The truth of scientific theories indicates that they must be describing reality. This is enough to support the realism that Cobb needs to justify his belief that he is in the real world, and thus that Mal’s skepticism is unfounded. Putnam qualifies his statements with the concept of “approximate truth” because he realizes that scientific theories are rarely (if ever) wholly complete. They are constantly being updated and revised given new discoveries and data. Even if parts of a theory are mistaken, and may be dropped or changed in future versions of the theory, this does not mean that the theory does not accurately describe reality to some degree. Take, for example, Copernicus’s view that the Sun is the center of the universe and that the planets revolve around it in circular orbits. Surely this view could be said to accurately describe reality—at the least, it was much more accurate than the existing “Earth-centered” model—even though it was later discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical, and that the Sun is the center of the solar system only (not the entire universe). So it seems that science has stepped in and shown that radical skepticism is avoidable. Some philosophers, though, have raised doubts about this and questioned the scientific realist position, taking an “antirealist” position. Some antirealists argue that science is a tool through which we seem to be able to manipulate the world, but that it cannot help us know the world. Others suggest that science is too caught up in the fallibility of humans; due to our finite abilities, we could never possibly hope to know truths about reality, nor could we even recognize them if they were presented to us. If, as the antirealist will hold, the realists’ arguments are not sufficient to show that science is in fact describing reality, then this defense against the radical skepticism will fail, leaving us again with no way to argue against Mal’s doubts about the world. So let us reconsider the “no miracle” argument. The argument makes a step from the empirical success of a theory, via the claim that there are no miracles, to the conclusion that the theory must be approximately true. So, one wonders, is the empirical success of a theory sufficient to indicate that there is an element of truth in the theory? When we consider how science has changed throughout history, we are tempted to think that it is not. Throughout the history of scientific investigation there have been many theories that were, at the time, empirically successful but later turned out to have completely inaccurate descriptions of the world.

WAYS OUT OF SKEPTICISM

An oft-cited example is the phlogiston theory, which explained combustion and rusting. Phlogiston was posited as a substance that was lost from combustible substances when they burned. Predictions made by the theory were in line with the evidence of the time, including the fact that covering a candle with a cup would make it go out. (It was thought that the air in the cup could only “handle” so much phlogiston. Once it was full, the candle could no longer “put out” phlogiston.) The theory was later dropped, however. First it was discovered that some metals, like magnesium, actually gain weight when heated—how could that happen, if they were losing phlogiston? Defenders of phlogiston scrambled to explain away such evidence by insisting that sometimes phlogiston has “negative weight.” But this was clearly just an excuse to save the theory. The discovery of oxygen, the development of oxygen-based theories of combustion, and the realization that such theories were much simpler (and that one doesn’t have to make silly excuses to save them), led to the demise of the phlogiston theory. It is undeniable, however, that phlogiston theory fit the evidence of the time. It was empirically successful at both explaining and predicting the behavior of substances undergoing combustion. If we had applied the “no miracles” argument to it, and thought the argument valid, we would have concluded that the theory of phlogiston accurately described the world. Yet clearly it did not. Worse yet, if two competing theories make the same successful predictions, the miracles argument would force us to conclude that both theories accurately describe the world. This was the case with Newton’s theory of gravitation and Einstein’s theory of relativity for a while; they both made all the same observable predictions. But they said fundamentally different and opposing things about the nature of the universe; they couldn’t both be right. But by the lights of the “no miracles” argument, they would have to be. So something must be wrong with the “no miracles” argument.

WAYS OUT OF SKEPTICISM

ur hat o now t ill w not k y n e a h c e that t — hat w s, t s ic ie is theor lism echan ic rea um m giston if t al t t n lo n n a h e ie u p ndam t like ce. Q for sc viden here ent fu tly are no r e r n r s e e e u r r g ie c r r u n f u t o a eas o are c by fu ic the r The d t if ) a t c s r n e ays e ie r r d oth theor nt scie ill alw n inco curre ity, an ntific hey w t prove iv ie t t not c a e s la h b e lso ess is now t other y of r not a l succ e, as theor nnot k a s l “no a r ic a c u r e ir e o e h p c w en hen t ll, of ever, t nt em the g e e w , r w o r h t h u s s (a e tru en, c ful. If, ximat ve se physic ccess appro lly su we ha a f s o ic a ir roves d emp claim tem p ul, an ut t a to g the cessf a c in h t u t r n s r o g u so p be hinkin g; it t f sup . t o s in d il im is a r le h in f surp t tell g beh ment capab es no ot too sonin ” argu o n a s d for e r is , le It c o ’s . is mira yway t so d Cobb nd th n u t A a B a . . h s t s m In il work eans her). a tote ing fa how it This m dream e told ble as s h a t y( li o w n e n o e r a e is uld very riadn he kn hy wo that h eam; and A is not r W nd ) p e ? y r o r n ll t e e f a he forev of dif his ow origin that t hers e task ot spin e is in h s n h t a s r o e w e t it up wheth top do Mal ( is not hat a atter, clearly now t k m e ll t that m a e he to on’t w did? T fact, d that it . m li a a e e ty r rom r one d eam f r d g tiatin

Concerning knowledge, pragmatism asserts that we should not think of ways to doubt things that we seem to just intuitively know and would otherwise accept without question. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), one of the key figures in the promotion of pragmatism, wrote, “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” What would Peirce say about radical skepticism? He would ask, “Do we naturally feel that the world we experience is the real world?” Of course, the answer is yes. And since we feel intuitively that the external world is real, and we experience it at least roughly as such, Peirce would conclude that we should not doubt its existence, nor seriously consider the sort of radical skepticism that would lead us to be convinced that we are dreaming. At least in everyday life (rather than philosophical study) this would seem to suffice. If we cannot know for sure one way or the other whether we are dreaming or not, then the sensible conclusion would be the one that follows our natural instincts on the issue: believe we are not dreaming. What would Peirce conclude about whether Cobb or Mal was right? On the pragmatic level, the radical beliefs that led Mal to extreme actions and risks are sufficient to explain and support our intuitive feeling that Mal is mistaken and Cobb is correct. Thus, it would seem, we can conclude that Mal was indeed driven insane by doubts, at least from a pragmatic viewpoint. We cannot prove that she was wrong, but that she was wrong does seem to be the sensible view.

68 WAYS OUT OF SKEPTICISM

Within the realm of everyday life, however, pragmatic considerations

te a t s a n i e Lif l a c i d a r s i f o m s i c i t p ; e ske l b i ss o p im are compelling.

you would not be able to function properly if you seriously doubted that the objects that you are interacting with are not real. Furthermore, if the way to â&#x20AC;&#x153;wake upâ&#x20AC;? is to die in the dream in which we live, then the risk of being wrong would lead most people to think it was not worth it. We cannot prove the issue one way or another, but living as though the external world is real produces far fewer complications. Put simply, we may not (ever) be able to prove that we are not dreaming, but I would not jump out of a window to test the hypothesis.

N DA

E EIJ

ESCAPING REALITY 72

Psychologists are well aware of the human tendencies to prefer things to remain the same and to favor what they are familiar with over unfamiliar things of equal or even greater value. These tendencies are collectively referred to as “status quo bias” and are considered irrational because they can make us miss out on beneficial changes of circumstance. You may not realize it, but mere exposure to a person can make you think that they are more attractive. If you happened to live in the same town as Ellen Page (Ariadne) and had caught a glimpse of her here and there, then you would prefer to look at a picture of her rather than one of an equally attractive person. Psychologists recently demonstrated this by planting several equally attractive models in a class, each a different number of times, making the students familiar with each of them to a different degree. The students were then asked to rate pictures of the models, which they did, scoring the models they were more familiar with more highly.

s s ter ck’ ozi s mat ut N b t e le nc ber Ro perie joyab hat er n t x h e e p so laim ore our hilo just g a m t to c p ed than livin an wn sw e o eno t mor ble t opher r on tha era hilos ed t ref bas umen y is p hen p s g rk lit to w wo l ar rea are werfu ife in erred n i ta po al ref oun and iving ways l l s m ring t i a a h h st of t nee dt mo top 2) pio taine t is al e n h i 0 n t At 8–20 ck ma ume i 3 rg (19 . Noz His a r. e us life. att to eal oes m r n d u lity rea

In another experiment, three classes of students were rewarded for completing a task. In the first class, the students were given a mug and then (a short while later) asked if they wanted to swap their mug for a chocolate bar. In the second class, the students were given a chocolate bar and then (a short while later) asked if they wanted to swap their chocolate bar for a mug. In the third class, the students were given a choice between a chocolate bar and a mug. Despite only having to raise a piece of colored paper to accept the offer to switch gifts, only 10 percent of students from the first two classes chose to do so. This is unusual because about half of the students from the third class chose the mug and the other half the chocolate bar—indicating that the bar and the mug had similar value. It can’t be that 40 percent of the students in classes one and two were just too lazy or shy to swap their reward. Psychologists think that the students didn’t want to swap their rewards because they had created irrational attachments to them—they overvalued them because they had become familiar with them.

ow dh ate s we r t ons f live ave h dem ds o d r we in ha a rig ich k hose e wit e B t r r e h a d to e e mo e tw elip abou milar iliar w le or ar F r i e b he ions ios s am joya tw f p a o s h s n ci los les ore e ue w nar l phi ur de sce t the m g o rva he a t n t i h , t it is ove s c y l f e d U t i f s. o af en ale en dt es. ive rec can rselv d reve e it ev e ten tial l e r s o s w ia en ou igar nm ob r hoo that e pot or t Eve s qu ose f , de B oc w t a o u u e h l t r g o s va sta ld ch derin we a is to ee u si ely l this hen w n k o wo i l w nc ss f al bee the le int o uding o l , p c e lif he th, in i l. T rea liar w i m fa

ESCAPING REALITY

As we were sitting on the edge of our seats, watching Cobb’s totem spin smoothly at the end of Inception , our minds were racing. When Cobb’s spinning top jolted, as though kicked out of a relaxing dream, we heard the sharp intake of breath around us and we felt it in our own throats, too. But Cobb’s totem kept spinning until the screen faded to black and the credits rolled. It’s only natural that we wanted to know if Cobb’s spinning top was going to fall—we are curious creatures who compulsively seek the truth. Now, though, you should realize that it doesn’t really matter what happened to that spinning top. Christopher Nolan, who has been notoriously tight-lipped about what really happens in Inception , has even said that Cobb doesn’t care if his spinning top falls at the end: “The real point of the scene . . . is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing.”

76 ESCAPING REALITY

We were caught in the grip of some assumptions that we had good reason to think of as true. But now that we have had the chance to think about Inception for a while, we should question those assumptions. Since things that don’t affect our consciousness can’t affect how our life goes for us, reality doesn’t really matter. We think that reality matters to us, but it’s really familiarity that fact, living in Limbo could allow for us to lead lives that we find more enjoyable and meaningful. Die-hard fans of reality might try to convince you that reality should matter to you, even when it will not affect your consciousness in any way. If this happens, you should point out to them that they are probably being blinded by a couple of assumptions. You should encourage them to watch Inception and reevaluate whether they can be sure if they are dreaming or not. Most important, get them to question their assumption that they are currently living in reality. They’ll realize that they can’t ever be sure that they’re not dreaming. And because the cost of more enjoyment and sense of meaning is too high for the mere chance of living in reality, they too will understand that it doesn’t matter if Cobb’s spinning top falls or not.

In fact, they’ll probably wish that Cobb would just throw his totem away and focus on finding enjoyment and meaning in his life because they, too, will realize that it’s our experiences that really matter, not whether we are living in reality. 77

WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING

Inception ’s seemingly happy ending shows Cobb being reunited with his children. To find out whether he is in the real world or in a dream, Cobb takes out his totem. We see his top spinning until Christopher Nolan cuts to the ending credits. The open ending inevitably leaves us wondering. Does the top keep spinning or does its slight wobble indicate that it will fall? Such questions drive some of us to Internet forums to discuss whether the ending is indeed a happy one or whether we are being tricked into believing it is. Why do we care so much about whether or not the top keeps spinning? Does it matter whether or not Cobb really managed to get out of Limbo? Wouldn’t he be as happy if he were dreaming the final scenes? Others have argued that reality doesn’t matter. I will argue that it does.

BART ENGELMAN

We leave the movie theater not just wondering about Cobb’s situation but also whether our own beliefs and experiences are as truthful and authentic as they seem. Can we ever know what the real world is like? Is it possible that the things and people we think we know are figments of our imagination? Here we enter what philosophers call epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. As Nolan shows, the fact that our ideas and beliefs about the world are the result of input processed by our brains raises the possibility of people hacking into our minds and making us believe whatever they want us to believe. If some highly skilled and equipped “dream team” were to kidnap you and hook you up to a machine that registers and stimulates your brain, they could make you see, hear, feel, and think things you would swear were real. From inside this dream, could you possibly discover its illusory nature? What way is there for you to know what situation you are in? Inception provides a fantastic—in all the senses of the word—version of this problem. It’s a problem that has troubled philosophers at least since René Descartes (1596–1650) considered the possibility that he might be living inside a dream. While you might think you are reading a philosophy book about Inception right now, Descartes reminds you that you can have exactly the same experience when dreaming. In fact, you can’t exclude this possibility altogether: “When I think about this more carefully, I see so clearly that I can never distinguish, by reliable signs, being awake from being asleep.” Descartes goes even further and imagines being deluded by “some evil mind, who is all powerful and cunning” so “that the sky, air, earth, colors, shapes, sounds and everything external to me are nothing more than the creatures of dreams by means of which an evil spirit entraps my credulity.” It is as if he is imagining an omnipotent but evil dream architect.

Imagine you are Robert Fischer, who ends up in the backseat of a cab with two strangers, getting shot at. Just as we initially can’t know that Inception’s first scenes of Cobb washing up onshore are set in Limbo, Fischer can’t know that he is inside someone’s (very wet) dream. Philosophers known as skeptics argue that the very possibility that we are being mind, how can you be sure that your other ideas are genuinely yours? (“Inception can’t really happen,” you say to yourself. But how do you know that this very belief is not the result of an act of inception?) Unlike ordinary doubt about a specific belief, which occurs against a background of undisputed beliefs, this skeptical doubt is global, confirming Socrates’ insight that the only real wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing. You know that from an epistemological point of view, Inception centers around the question of whether we can ever tell the real world from the dream world. Just like we can’t rule out Descartes’ evil spirit, it is perfectly possible that every single scene in Inception is part of one big dream. The skeptical problem raises another question, however. If you can’t know whether or not you are living a real life, why go on living it?

WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING

Or, let me put the question another way. If a machine existed that could make you dream of a perfect life, why not plug into it? When Ariadne wonders who would ever want to be “stuck in a dream,” Yusuf rightly replies that it “depends on the dream.” Some dreams can indeed be much nicer than real life. When given the chance to choose, would you prefer the harsh reality over the perfect dream? This question, which defined the lives of Cobb and Mal, is not an epistemological but an ethical one. It concerns not what we can know but what we should do.

Imagine you are Ariadne, sitting outside a Paris café and listening to Cobb’s job description of a dream architect: “You create the world of the dream.” If you accept his job offer, you will learn to build dreams as you please. Everything will spring from your very own mind. You can draw on your memories (such as the last time you saw your children) or simply use your imagination. It would be “pure creation.” Now imagine that you could choose to live your whole life inside those dreams. This possibility resembles a thought experiment from American philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. To see the genius of this experience machine, try to be like Eames, who tells Arthur not to “be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” If you like guns, why not go for a grenade launcher? After all, in the world you create, the sky is the limit. To imagine what life would be like inside Nozick’s experience machine, think of Mal in Limbo. She and Cobb together could make everything as they wanted it to be, from the shores and the city to the house they lived in. As Cobb explains to Ariadne,

“feeling like gods.” they were

For Cobb, “the problem was knowing

that none of it was real.” While he held onto that unsettling thought, Mal chose to forget the truth. In the end, “Limbo became her reality.” Not

only did she live a wonderful life, she also grew blissfully ignorant about its illusory nature. Similarly, Nozick’s experience machine can create any experience you might want, including the accompanying sense that all these experiences are genuinely and authentically yours. Nozick stresses that people inside the experience machine don’t know that they are dreaming: “While in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening.” Similarly, while in Limbo Mal didn’t know that she was there; she thought it was all actually happening. 85

Now think of a machine so powerful that it creates all the dreams you want it to, including the illusion that they are true. Would you plug in? If you feel sad for Mal when she takes Limbo for reality, then you probably think there is more to (a good) life than having (pleasurable) experiences. According to Nozick, you would belong to the majority of people who wouldn’t plug into the experience machine. When offered the option to enter the perfect , you realize that this is not how you want to live your life. You, too, “want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” If Nozick is right, most of us are concerned with living not only a happy but also a real life. While this shows that people want their experiences to track reality, it does not show that they actually do track reality. Nozick’s thought experiment reveals that most people do not want to live a lie; it does not show that we are not living a lie, or that we know that we aren’t. As such, Nozick’s arguments are directed not against the epistemological theory of skepticism, but against the ethical theory of hedonism. According to hedonism, a good life simply consists in having pleasurable experiences. But Nozick believes that the value

A good life simply consists in having pleasurable experiences.

of one’s life also depends on the extent to which these experiences are authentic and real. That we want Cobb to really see his children again— we want the top to topple—and that we pity Mal for mistaking Limbo for reality and wishing to stay there seem to vindicate Nozick. Apparently, living a perfect dream does not constitute what most of us would call a good life. As Ariadne knows all along, living a lie is always less valuable than living a life.

In the movie, the dream team seems to have found a solution to the skeptical problem. Each of them carries a personal totem, which, as Ariadne puts it, serves as “an elegant solution for keeping track of reality.” Cobb’s top is so important to him because it allows him to dismiss the skeptical possibility and find out whether or not the sky, air, earth, colors, shapes, and sounds he sees and hears are part of a dream. His faith in the trustworthiness of his totem serves as the basis upon which all his other beliefs rest. It is what epistemological foundationalists call a basic or foundational belief that grounds and gives support to other, derivative beliefs. For Cobb’s basic belief in the reliability of his top to serve as a foundation stone, it has to be self-evident. As Arthur explains, the totem has a particular feel to it that only its owner is familiar with. When asked how he knows that this particular die is his totem, he can only say that it feels right. This basic belief can no longer be justified by other beliefs. Upon closer inspection, however, we see that totems don’t make for infallible evidence upon which all other beliefs can be grounded. Again, Arthur puts it well: “When you look at your totem, you know beyond a doubt you’re not in someone else’s dream.” While the totem’s particular feel makes it nearly impossible for dream architects to re-create it, it does not rule out the possibility that you are inside your own dream (or inside the dream of an architect or dreamer who has touched your totem, or knows how it works). The fact that totems are not foolproof solutions for keeping track of reality illustrates the skeptical doubt. Skeptics ultimately deny the possibility of finding rock-hard evidence to discriminate between what is real and what only seems real. Just as Cobb can’t rely on his top to rule out the possibility of being inside his own dream, we can never know for sure that we are not living inside a dream right here, right now.

WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING

Because the search for unshakable basic beliefs is fruitless, foundationalism has been challenged by a rival theory: coherentism. According to coherentism, beliefs are justified if they cohere with one another, which means that they do not contradict and can be mutually derived from one another. No belief is more basic than another; they all form parts of a coherent web. Think of inception. If you could install in my mind the belief that I was as handsome, rich, and famous as Leonardo DiCaprio, it would not cohere with my other beliefs. Only if you could change or eliminate most of my other beliefs could this work. Because, as Arthur explains to Saito, “the subject’s mind can always trace the genesis of the idea,” the subject of inception should not only form the idea but also endorse it, which implies erasing all memories of its origin. On the Fischer job, the dream team has to go own.

88 WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING

Consider also Cobb’s failed attempts to convince Mal of what he thought was true. Only through inception did Cobb manage to implant “this simple little idea that would change everything.” He used Mal’s totem— which she locked up in the safe the world she believed to be real was in fact not. He opened her safe, spun her top (since it was a dream, it never stopped spinning), and then closed it again. But the idea that was true in Limbo—“that her world wasn’t real”—lingered on into the real world . Once Mal became convinced that her world wasn’t real, Cobb couldn’t convince her otherwise. He could provide no unshakable evidence for his view that their previous lives in Limbo were part of a dream and that their lives in the real world weren’t. So Cobb’s first successful act of inception worked to get Mal out of Limbo but also led to her suicide in the real world . Whereas most skeptics preach radical doubt and ignorance (we can never know for sure whether our world is real), Mal remained suicidal because she took the skeptical dream scenario not as a possibility but as the truth (she thought she knew her world wasn’t real). While foundationalists would say that Cobb’s inception eroded the pillars of her belief system, coherentists would say that the resulting idea contaminated the other parts of her web of beliefs. As a result, her beliefs were coherent. So there was, in a way, a method to her madness.

Even though we can’t prove that we are living real lives in truth, we shouldn’t deny that these things matter. The fact that we can’t know anything for sure does not mean that we can or should simply believe whatever we want to believe. What it does mean, though, is that we shouldn’t waste our time trying to prove that the world is real. Since no foolproof totems exist, they simply are of no use. Imagine the real-life counterpart to Cobb who continuously aims to find evidence that what he deems real is real (and puts a gun to his head just in case it turns out otherwise). This would be madness. Obsessive attempts to prove that life is real are futile and distract from what matters in life: that we live it. Maybe that is why Cobb leaves his top and goes off to see his children. Instead of trying to remove all doubt and justify his basic belief in reality, Cobb turns away from the top toward his children, revealing that he wants to go on with his life. As Cobb makes clear to Mal when they meet again in Limbo, he has been racked with guilt after planting the idea in her mind that her world wasn’t real. In these crucial scenes, Cobb manages to redeem himself. He understands that his dreams about Mal’s projection—who is “just a shade” of his real wife—no longer suffice. Finally, he realizes that he has to move on: “We had our time together. But I have to let you go.” What matters in the movie is not so much that the Fischer job succeeds but that Cobb succeeds in getting his life back on track. In the song the dreamers use to signal the end of a dream, Edith Piaf sings: “ Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien .” She regrets nothing. Cobb no longer regrets the things he has done and realizes it is time for him to take up his life again. Nolan has stressed time and again that Cobb coming to terms with his past is the emotional baseline upon which Inception is based. It is his redemption, his emotional journey, and his realization that pleasurable dreams don’t amount to a life worth living that drive the movie and make us feel for its protagonist. From Cobb’s and Mal’s repeated dialogue, which beautifully captures this emotional baseline, it becomes clear that they care more about each other than about epistemological certainty: “You’re waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you. But you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. Because you’ll be together.” Even though Cobb and Mal “can’t know for sure” that their suicide will bring them back to reality, they hope it will. Even though Cobb can’t know for sure that the faces he sees are really his children’s, he sure hopes they are. While he can never completely rule out the possibility that his life is a lie, what matters is that he can live it together with his children.

Instead of asking whether the top keeps spinning, we should wonder why we (or Cobb, for that matter) care about whether it does. The heated debates about the top reveal that we care about the authenticity and veracity of experiences and beliefs. Nobody—not even dream layers deep. Because we can “trace the genesis of the idea,” we never fully endorse the suggestion that our world is some imaginary construction by an evil spirit, a dream team, or ourselves. This is also why it doesn’t spur us into action. Fortunately, reading skeptical philosophers typically does not make us lay our heads on a railroad track. In a way, Inception ’s closing image of the spinning top symbolizes the limits of human knowledge. Not only can’t we determine Cobb’s fate, we also can’t discover the nature of our own predicament. Nolan’s cut to the ending credits nicely illustrates the fact that we can never get outside our own mental lives. The point is not that we are living in a dream or that we are living in reality. The point is that we have no reliable way of finding out for sure. And if this is so, what sense is there in endlessly trying to figure it out? We simply have to live with the fact that Inception ’s ending will always remain ambiguous and that our own lives will never be completely free from doubt. Still, this insight does not drive us into depression or insanity. As hard as it is to philosophically or empirically refute skeptics, it is just as easy to put them aside in the practice of everyday life. In the end, it is real life, not philosophy, that ends the debates between skeptics and its opponents. Rather than trying to justify our basic belief in reality, we should treat it as an unavoidable habit of our minds without which our lives wouldn’t make sense. While Inception ’s epistemological puzzles are fascinating and challenging, they can’t be solved by philosophers and they should not rule our lives. After entertaining the thought that we are living inside an elaborate dream, we should follow Cobb in moving on with our lives, which are and will always remain our reality. We should, in other words, stop worrying about the spinning top and go watch another Nolan classic.

WHY CARE IF THE TOP KEEPS SPINNING

ETHICS OF PLANTING IDEAS ADAM BARKMAN

Inception is a movie about idea-giving, specifically about “inception” or the act of an “extractor” or dream navigator planting an idea in the mind of his unknowing, dreaming subject. Because idea-giving is a normative act—that is, an act having to do with what’s morally right or wrong— inception is also a normative act. As Dom Cobb tells Saito, “You asked me for inception. I do hope you understand the gravity of that request. The seed that we will plant in this man’s mind will grow into an idea and this idea will define him. It may come to change everything about him.” Large moral issues loom when you tinker with the very fabric of a person’s being. But giving someone an idea—isn’t that pretty much what teaching is? If so, then teaching is moral only if inception is. But doesn’t it seem that inception is, at least on some level, immoral? And what about giving suggestions under hypnosis? That really looks like inception. Would that be moral? Let’s explore the ethics of inception by exploring the ethics of idea-giving in general and specifically talking about teaching and hypnosis—arguably the two most important methods of idea-giving.

Convinced by postmodernist epistemologies, some philosophers of education have argued that all forms of teaching—the most typical method of idea-giving—are immoral, since whatever is selected to be taught is nothing but the subjective preference of a particular individual or culture. These philosophers would say, for example, that the mere fact that Cobb teaches his young children, James and Phillipa, that “This world is the real world” or even that “Tokyo is a city in Japan” violates their rights to choose to believe whatever they want. Wisely, few take this view too seriously. The view contradicts itself. It suggests that “All forms of teaching are immoral because everything that is taught is only subjectively true” while asserting that this proposition itself is objectively true. In other words, it is objectively true that there are no objective truths. Obviously, this is contradictory nonsense. As a parent, Cobb can’t avoid giving some ideas to his children. Moreover, the ideas he gives his children will unavoidably be filtered through his own worldview. For example, if Cobb were a Buddhist, he would believe that the goal of life is to escape the cycle of reincarnation or samsara , which can be achieved by adhering to the Noble Eightfold Path, which (in part) states that knowledge of our circumstances is beneficial to such an escape. Consequently, because Cobb, in our example, would be a Buddhist and not, for instance, a Hindu, he would likely think Buddhism to be truer or more correct than Hinduism and would very likely teach this worldview to James and Phillipa.

However, educator I. A. Snook would argue that for Cobb to engage in this form of idea-giving would be immoral. “Teaching for belief in religious propositions is always indoctrination.” Snook’s comment would suggest that our hypothetical Cobb is immoral for teaching his children particular content , namely religious content, because doing so necessarily implies indoctrination and indoctrination is immoral. Yet, one wonders, what exactly is a religious proposition? And why would indoctrination be immoral? Defining “religion” is difficult. But if a religion is, as one dictionary has it, “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies,” then Snook’s argument may have a problem. How is metaphysical materialism—presumably Snook’s worldview—not a religion? After all, it, just as much as Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and so on, maintains that the world came to be through forces beyond human control and certainly has an account of the cause of the universe (the big bang), the nature of the universe (everything is material), and the purpose of the universe (there is no purpose). Even the agnostic—if Snook happened to be one—could easily be fitted into this definition of religion. So, at least in respect to the definition above, it seems that every worldview is a religion. And if so, by the lights of Snook’s argument, teaching anything would imply indoctrination, and would thus be immoral. But that just doesn’t seem right. Certainly, Snook wouldn’t agree.

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Maybe it’s not religious belief per se that is the problem—but just indoctrination itself. What exactly is indoctrination? Philosopher R. M. Hare (1919–2002) says, “Indoctrination only begins when we are trying to stop the growth in our children of the capacity to think for themselves.” According to Hare, an indoctrinated child or person is one who has been given ideas and told to believe them regardless of the evidence— to slavishly accept a proposition or series of propositions in a fashion that disregards his or her autonomy and eliminates critical openness. For Hare, the problem isn’t so much the content of the teaching, but rather the method of the teaching. For example, if Cobb were to teach his children that the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism are beyond question— to teach James and Phillipa that it’s unacceptable to reflect critically upon the truth of these claims—then, according to Hare, Cobb would be indoctrinating or engaging in immoral idea-giving. While Hare certainly seems to be on the right path, he overlooks something that Plato, Aristotle, and modern educational psychologists all insist upon: a child’s rationality develops . Because a young child like James or Phillipa—let’s say a child under or around the age of five—can only reason on a very rudimentary level, the child won’t really be able to challenge the beliefs given to him or her. James and Phillipa wouldn’t really be able to challenge the Buddhist ideas given to them by their dad, and so they would likely, for a time, make these beliefs their own. There is no avoiding this. Buddhism, then, would become James and Phillipa’s “plausibility structure,” and this, in itself, would both be moral and, indeed, necessary for healthy growth: a tree can’t grow in a vacuum; it needs soil, even, if it were the case, contaminated soil.

What would be immoral, however, is if Cobb failed to encourage rational development in his children—if he failed to give them the tools of logic that would allow them eventually to understand the reasons for and against Buddhism and then to accept or reject Buddhism based on their rational autonomy. The word “eventually,” of course, neither denotes a set age or time, nor does it indicate a clear, black-and-white argument for-and-against. It is a process. Therefore, if, when James and Phillipa are ready to start school, Cobb were to enroll them in a Buddhist school, he wouldn’t necessarily be acting immorally because within the context of the Buddhist school, the children could learn how to reason critically while at the same time learning how a Buddhist might view history, literature, other worldviews, and so on. Secular humanist parents could send their children to secular humanist schools, Christians to Christian schools, Hindus to Hindu schools. And, provided that they were being taught by the schools (and, of course, the parents) to reflect critically on what is being taught and given the freedom to accept or reject what is taught, none of these parents and schools should, in themselves, be seen as indoctrinating.

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Nevertheless, if Cobb were a Buddhist, then he might also accept certain Buddhist beliefs that, if taught , could easily be seen as immoral. What beliefs? Many interpret certain sayings of the Buddha to entail that the laws of logic are relative and argue that his doctrine of no self— anatman— entails that there is no free will. If Cobb passed such beliefs on to his children, he could be seen as discouraging them from thinking for themselves. One cannot reason without the rules of logic and one cannot freely decide what to believe without free will. For teaching to not be indoctrination, some objective truths must be asserted. Without these truths, children won’t have the tools necessary to challenge the worldview in which they are raised.

Some philosophers, of course, will argue that to assert any objectivity, much less genuine autonomy, is to assert something that is relative or subjective to a particular worldview. I deny this. While all people work from within a worldview, not all truth claims asserted from within a worldview are relative or dependent on that worldview being true as whole. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proven.

Some truths such as 1 + 1 = 2, “It’s always wrong to torture a child for fun,” and the Law of Identity are immediately seen to be self-evident once we understand the terms, and there is no way for these propositions to be false. Even if everyone on the planet thought 1 + 1 = 2 is a social construction, this would not make it so.

They would be wrong. Even if some, such as serial killers, thought it okay

to torture children for fun, they would be wrong —not because most of society agrees, but because it is plainly and simply wrong. We know these truths by what the ancient Egyptians called Ma’at ; the ancient Iranians, Asha ; the ancient Hindus, Rita ; Confucius (551–479 bce), “the Way of Heaven”; Plato (427–347 bce), the Form of Goodness; the Stoics, Natural Law; and Protestants, the General Revelation of God. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) considers educating people in these truths as natural as “grown birds . . . teaching young birds to fly,” and surely he is right.

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Our discussion of the ethics of teaching and hypnosis strongly indicates that the person to whom an idea is being given must at all times be treated with respect as to his or her person. This, however, in no way entails that such a person should never be given ideas that he or she can’t immediately reflect upon or choose for themselves at the moment . The young child will be taught many things that she can process only later, and the hypnotized subject will be given suggestions which he consented to have no power to resist. Given this, how should we view the ethics of inception or the act of an extractor or dream navigator planting an idea in the mind of his unknowing, dreaming subject? In the movie, we know the details of two cases of inception: the first between Cobb and his wife Mal, and the second between Cobb and Fischer. Both situations are different, but different? In the case of Cobb and Mal, both knew they were sharing a dream. They were there for what felt like fifty years, building their own world, like gods. At first it was fun, but eventually it became impossible for them to “live like that”—knowing it was a dream. Mal responded to this by choosing to forget it wasn’t real, locking the totem she used to tell dream from reality in the safe of her mind. But not Cobb. Desperate to escape and wake Mal, he planted the idea in her mind that her world was not real (by spinning her totem, a top that never fell, in the safe of her mind). But he did this with Mal’s concession to neither the act of inception nor the content of the act. The idea took hold, and so she agreed to “kill” herself in the dream, under the assumption that this would wake her. However, without Cobb realizing it, this idea had taken root like “a cancer” in Mal’s mind, causing her to believe that the real world was “not real” and that the only escape was another suicide attempt. She, consequently, threw herself from the window of a hotel that she and Cobb frequented. Ariadne assures Cobb, “You’re not responsible for the idea that destroyed her.” But it’s clear from what we know that he is. Nevertheless, is Cobb morally to blame? A bad end caused by an individual isn’t the same as the individual being morally to blame for that bad end occurring.

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Because Mal didn’t consent, as a hypnotized subject does, to being given ideas against her will for her benefit, we can’t justify Cobb in this way. However, if Mal was, like a rationally undeveloped child, largely incapable of processing what was true or false, then for Cobb to have treated her in such a manner doesn’t seem morally objectionable. Mal clearly wasn’t capable of processing what was true or false, and so for Cobb to have incepted her probably wasn’t immoral.

But there is more to say about this. I believe Cobb is morally to blame, since he was negligent as to the effects of inception. Yes, it was terrible that Mal was fooling herself into thinking that Limbo was real, but eventually they both would have woken up; they couldn’t have slept forever. Of course, later Eames worries that a prolonged stay in Limbo might turn one’s brain into scrambled eggs. However, it’s unclear whether Cobb knew of such risks at the time, so I don’t think that was his motivation. What he must have known, though, was that inception was risky—he didn’t know what the effects might be. So he should have stayed his hand. He was reckless, and his recklessness led to his wife throwing herself from the hotel window, just as much as if, for example, he neglected to periodically check his natural gas fireplace for leaks and, unchecked, it led to her death by carbon monoxide poisoning. Obviously, he’s not as blameworthy as a man who intended to kill his wife, but negligence—failing to think of and perform an act one ought to think of and perform—is still a species of immorality.

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The case of Cobb and Fischer is a bit different, but still points to Cobb having acted immorally. To begin with, Cobb and his team were hired by Saito to incept Fischer—to give him the idea “I will break up my father’s empire” in order to prevent the birth of an energy monopoly or “superpower.” Saito believed the end—preventing “total energy dominance”— justified the means—giving a person an idea against his will. And, just to be clear, inception is against Fischer’s will; even though Fischer “gives himself the idea” on the third layer of the dream, it is “obviously an idea that Robert himself would choose to reject” if he were fully aware of what was going on. Thus, it should be clear that Saito’s consequentialist reasoning is incompatible with the ethics of idea-giving I’ve argued for in this chapter, namely, that a person must never be treated simply as a means to an end. Moreover, since Fischer didn’t consent to be incepted (as a hypnotized subject does) and was capable of rationally processing what was going on (unlike Mal and rationally undeveloped children), there is little room to justify what Cobb and his team did. Yes, the world may have been spared an evil, but the cost—treating a person as a mere means— doesn’t justify it.

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After Cobb agreed to take the Fischer job, he went to France to visit his father-in-law, who had taught Cobb the ways of dream navigation and who Cobb hoped would introduce him to another skilled dream navigator or “architect.” Knowing that Cobb, a fugitive, could only use his skills of dream navigation for illegal ends, the father-in-law plainly stated Cobb’s intention: “You’re here to corrupt one of my brightest and best.” In a flash of moral clarity, Cobb replied, “You have to let them decide for themselves .” Although this statement agrees with what I’ve argued for in this chapter about the ethics of idea-giving, particularly that a rationally developed person’s autonomy must always be respected, Cobb, sadly, didn’t heed his own words. In the case of Mal, he didn’t let her decide for herself, though this wasn’t in itself immoral since she was analogous to a rationally undeveloped child and needed to be forcibly given an idea. Cobb’s negligence made him immoral. In the case of Fischer, Cobb again didn’t let the other decide for himself decide for herself, though this wasn’t in itself immoral since she was analogous to a rationally undeveloped child and needed to be forcibly given an idea. Cobb’s negligence made him immoral. In the case of Fischer, Cobb again didn’t let the other decide for himself since, despite what Fischer in his dream believed, the man didn’t consent to being incepted in the first place. Cobb, therefore, acted immorally throughout, though we can soften this by adding that the ethics of idea-giving are often more complex than we imagine.

What is the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. eradicate. —Dom Cobb

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The seed that we plant in this man’s mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change—well, it may come to change everything about him. —Dom Cobb

Cobb and his team successfully implant an idea in Robert Fischer’s mind: “My father accepts that I want to create for myself, and not follow

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in his footsteps.” Subsequently (we presume) Fischer chooses to break up his father’s empire, the energy conglomerate Fischer his father’s empire free?

If Fischer’s choice is not free, then to what extent are any of us free? After all, as other chapters point out, inception happens to us all the time. Everything from movies to teachers, from politicians to news organizations constantly incept us. Further, many ideas are genetically implanted. Our mind is not a blank slate, as suggested by the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704); we are born with numerous ideas. Many of those ideas are the result of our initial brain structure, which is a direct result of our genetics. Our environment and our genes are natural inceptors. If inception interferes with free will, then it may be that no one is free.

JOHN.R.FITZPATRICK DAVID KYLE JOHNSON

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The most popular argument for why we are not free is the argument from determinism. Imagine a billiard table. Once the cue ball is set in motion, where all the balls will end up and the paths that they will take to get there is determined. The table and balls are governed by the laws of physics; nothing but what is determined by those laws can occur once the cue ball is set in motion. The billiard table is a deterministic system. The argument from determinism against free will suggests that the universe is like a three-dimensional billiard table, where the atoms are the billiard balls and space-time is the table. Everything that happens in the universe is the result of the motions of its atoms, and the motions of those atoms are governed by the laws of physics. Nothing but what is determined by those laws can occur once the universe is set in motion— which it was about 13 billion years ago, when it began with a Big Bang. Since we are a part of the of time. So whatever we decide to do, it is not possible for us to not decide to do it. We are not free. Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) asks us to imagine a superintelligent demon that knows every fact about the current location and velocity of all particles in the universe, and knows all the laws that govern them. Laplace suggests that his demon could simply do the math to figure out what the future holds. Nothing other than what the demon predicted could occur—not because he predicted it, but because the outcome is already determined by the way the universe is. Laplace’s demon is not unlike Cobb and his team. They, of course, are not omniscient (all-knowing), but to them Fischer’s brain is like a billiard table. If they just set things up in the right kind of way—cause him to have a certain kind of dream—they can predict exactly how he will react; Fischer will conclude that he should be his own person, and then, in turn, predictably, he will break up his father’s empire.

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—Dom Cobb

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The seed that we plant in this man’s mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change—well, it may come to change everything about him.

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Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) asks us to imagine a superintelligent demon that knows every fact about the current location and velocity of all particles in the universe, and knows all the laws that govern them. Laplace suggests that his demon could simply do the math to figure out what the future holds. Nothing other than what the demon predicted could occur—not because he predicted it, but because the outcome is already determined by the way the universe is. Laplace’s demon is not unlike Cobb and his team. They, of course, are not omniscient (all-knowing), but to them Fischer’s brain is like a billiard table. If they just set things up in the right kind of way—cause him to have a certain kind of dream—they can predict exactly how he will react; Fischer will conclude that he should be his own person, and then, in turn, predictably, he will break up his father’s empire. Those who hold that the universe is deterministic and that free will requires the possibility of not choosing as you do are known as harddeterminists. Obviously, they do not believe that we have free will. For those who still want to believe in free will, however, there is an option. If you can’t deny that free will requires the possibility of not choosing as you do, then you can deny that the world is deterministic. This is the libertarian view.

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The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was an extreme libertarian, arguing that while we don’t necessarily choose the situations we find ourselves in, we are free to interpret them any way we choose. He even suggests that we are free to remake our very essence at any moment. Cobb sees himself has a family man, who has to get back to his kids at all costs. When Saito offers him the opportunity, he seemingly can’t say no. But Sartre would deny this. Cobb could decide to not be a family man anymore, to not care about his kids, to simply walk away. He doesn’t even have to be an extractor anymore. He could become, we don’t know, let’s say, a postman. No possibility is off limits. We are free to interpret ourselves, and our situations, however we wish. The biggest problem with Sartre’s view, however, is that we don’t seem to actually have this kind of free will. Rape victims can’t interpret their experience however they want; they can’t simply decide to be the kind of person that likes being raped to avoid seeing the event as a misfortune. Likewise, while Cobb could choose to stay in Limbo, it’s doubtful that he could choose to believe that Limbo was real.

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Perhaps Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) may have been right when he suggested that our decisions. Once that decision is made, our brain constructs a pleasing story of “our conscious mind” coming to a decision— but it is only a story. “We” had nothing to do with it. Although Freudian psychoanalytic thought has gone largely out of style, it seems to be partly right on this point. Most often, we don’t choose what we do. We just do it, and then make up reasons and justify the decision after the fact. “I did what I had to, to get back to my children.” “I’m doing it for the others, because they have no idea the risk they’ve taken coming down here with you.” Our ever-expanding knowledge of the brain seems to confirm this. Scans show that unconscious parts of the brain are already in the business of bringing about an action, before the conscious “decision making” parts of the brain are active. Split-brain patients, whose brain hemispheres have been separated, show us justifications for already-made-unconscious-decisions happening in real time. When the nonverbal right hemisphere decides on its own that the body should do something, the left hemisphere will fabricate reasons for why it is being done. The more we study the brain, the more we realize that our conscious mind has very little to do with making decisions.

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Recent developments in neuroscience also tell us why it is so difficult to deny that determinism is true. For a long time, it was thought that our free will was the result of our being “ensouled.” The reason that it is possible for us to not decide as we do is, supposedly, that our decisions are not a result of a mechanistic physical process, but something that happens in our soul—an immaterial substance, which can reach out from beyond the world and control our body. Our ever-increasing knowledge of the brain, however, has left nothing for the soul to do. All the things that the soul was supposed to be responsible for—emotions, personality, visual experiences, linguistic ability, you name it—are now known to be a result of brain activity. We even have a pretty good idea where in the brain decisions are made—the right parietal cortex. When certain parts of the brain are damaged, you can actually see specific mental functions diminish or disappear. We do not yet understand everything about the brain, but we do know that all our mental activity is the direct result of its mechanistic physical processes. We, and our decisions, are just a part of the universe; and if the universe is governed by deterministic laws, so are we—so are our decisions. The last resort of the libertarian is quantum mechanics, which tells us that, at the level of fundamental particles, there are truly random events—events that are, literally, unpredictable and thus undetermined. Even if you knew everything about the universe, you the result of a random quantum event in his brain, his decision is not free. Second, the effect of quantum randomness at the microlevel is averaged out on the macrolevel. In other words, even though quantum mechanics is true, and tiny particles sometimes behave randomly, the universe still is deterministically predicable at the scale of large objects like brains and persons.

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Things don’t look good for free will. To save it, some philosophers have suggested redefining free will to make it compatible with determinism. Such philosophers are called, not surprisingly, “compatibilists.” However, it’s hard to call what they are doing “redefinition,” since such definitions date all the way back to Aristotle (384–322 bce). In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle suggested that actions should be considered free unless they are performed under compulsion or out of ignorance. For example, if the cause of an action is external to the agent, and the agent contributes nothing, then the action is not free. Arguably, inception would be just such an external cause and would invalidate free will. If so, Fischer does not freely choose to break up his father’s company. (We’ll talk more about that later.) Additionally, if the action is a result of the agent being ignorant—not realizing that his action will have some unintended consequence—then the action is not free. For example, if Cobb had not stopped Eames from shooting Saito in the first layer of the inception dream to “put him out of his misery,” Eames’s action of sending Saito to Limbo would not have been free. Eames thought that shooting him would wake him up.

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Locke, inspired by his “locked room” example, suggested that as long as we are acting in accord with our own preferences, we are free. Since we can do this even in the absence of the possibility of not choosing as we do, free will does not require such possibilities. And since his own preference to get back to his children. Putting it in terms of choice, if Locke is right, we could say that a choice is free as long as that choice is made in accordance with our own preferences of how to choose.

There’s a problem with this, however, as a compatibilist definition. If determinism is true, it seems our actions are done under compulsion. The ultimate causes of our actions are external to us. They trace all the way back to the Big Bang, and we contribute nothing to those causes. The only contribution we make is being part of the final links in a causal chain that we have no control over. That doesn’t seem to be compatible with our actions being “up to us.” But Aristotle got the ball rolling, and his ideas were incepted into later philosophers who then developed them.

Contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt articulates something very similar to Locke’s ideas in terms of first-order and second-order desires and our ability to rank them and act accordingly. You may have a (first-order) desire to eat a whole pizza, but you may also have a (second-order) desire to not have such desires—particularly because you don’t want to be sick later or because you want to lose weight. What makes you a free person, says Frankfurt, is your ability to rank these desires and act on them appropriately. If you override first-order desires with second-order desires—say by not eating the whole pizza, but only a slice—then you have produced what Frankfurt calls a “second-order volition.” You do so by a deliberation about the kind of person you want to be—namely, thinner or healthier. If you “conform your will” to your second-order volitions, then you act freely. If this definition is right, then free will is compatible with determinism. We can rank our first-order and second-order desires, override one with the other based on a deliberation of the kind of person we want to be, and thus conform our will to our second-order volitions, even if determinism is true. But is this definition right?

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Frankfurt proposed a thought experiment that attempted to show that his definition was indeed right and that the standard “able to choose otherwise” definition was wrong. It goes something like this. Suppose you were trying to decide whether to take a particular action, and someone planted a device in your brain that would kick in and make you do that action, but only if you were about to decide not to do it. Yet, because you decide to do it on your own, the device never kicks in. Do you not still act freely, even though you could not have decided otherwise? Frankfurt and most other philosophers think the answer is yes.

If we are free

, then incep-

tion is something to worry about. Someone as skilled as Cobb might be able to interfere with something as deep as our desire to have a certain kind of character, and thus hinder our free will. And remember, inception happens in the real world in the form of ideas implanted by teachers, parents, movies, and so on. If we are not free, though, why bother worrying? Inception can’t interfere with our free will if we don’t have any.

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DREAMING MINDS KEN MARABLE

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Inception poses a conundrum:

With shared dreaming, where does the take place? The obvious answer is that each person has the dream in his or her own mind. Each person has his or her own dream, which, because they are all hooked up to the dream-sharing technology briefcase (the PASIV device), resembles the dream of everyone else. The same basic events take place in each person’s dream. Somehow, though, people are able to influence one another’s minds and interact within the dream world. This partial blending of minds seems strange at first, but two philosophical notions— extended minds and collective minds—can solve the conundrum.

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Consciousness, or self-awareness, is a fundamental property of the human mind, and it seems clearly limited to the space between our ears and behind our eyes. At most, consciousness goes out to our skin, where we feel sensations. Consciousness isn’t all there is to the human mind, however. A mind is actually a loose conglomeration of all kinds of mental and neural processes that we lump together under a single term. Minds have non-conscious processes—processes that, for example, categorize sounds as either mountain winds or slowed-down music. Minds also have subconscious emotional baggage—such as guilt concerning abandoned children and a deceased wife. Still, the mind seems limited to the body However, two contemporary philosophers, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, have challenged the bodily limitation with their theory of the extended mind. To see how, consider this example. In Inception , we often see Arthur with a notebook. Let’s suppose, for the sake of this example, that he has a habit of always keeping it on him, and writing things down in it, because he knows that his memory is not perfectly reliable. After all, how can he ever be sure a memory has not been incepted into him? Furthermore, he knows that human memory is notorious for filling in missing details with what seems plausible. Let’s suppose that Eames, on the other hand, sees Arthur’s notebook as remarkably quaint. Having made a living creating false documents, Eames would never rely on such an easily faked physical object. Instead, always self-assured, he relies only upon his own brain for information. When Cobb arranges a meeting with the group, Arthur writes down the location in his notebook, whereas Eames simply memorizes it. On the day of the meeting, having been busy with other preparations and never trusting his brain anyway, Arthur checks his notebook for the location. Eames, always working another angle somewhere, has been preoccupied as well and has to take a moment to think back and recall the location of the meeting. Common sense would tell us that since Arthur relied on information in his notebook and Eames relied on his brain, they performed very different tasks. But how different are they?

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Neither one had the information consciously present. Both had to access that information from somewhere other than conscious thought. Arthur checked his notebook, consciousness. Accessing the storage produced the same thoughts of the proper location for both of them. The difference of where the thoughts were stored (in Arthur’s paper and ink or Eames’s brain) is irrelevant, according to Clark and Chalmers. In both cases, conscious thought must seek out and find that information, and the end result of the information coming to mind is the same. According to Clark and Chalmers’s theory of extended mind, Arthur’s notebook, as long as he uses it reliably, is part of his memory. As long as he keeps it with him, and readily available, most of the time, it works as part of his memory in every way that Eames’s more natural memory does. The notebook has the same function as memory, namely a place to store information that can be brought back to mind. Therefore, since it functions in the same way, it is a part of Arthur’s memory in every relevant sense. And since memory is part of the mind, his mind is extended to the notebook. This may not be as strange as it first sounds. After all, even our sense of our own bodies is flexible. Driving a car often leads us to extend our bodily sense to include the car. We stop consciously thinking about how to drive the car; we simply will it forward (we don’t consciously think about putting our foot on the gas pedal) much of the time. So if our bodies can, in a sense, be extended to objects, is it so strange to think our minds can as well?

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In numerous interviews, Christopher Nolan has discussed the analogy producer, Ariadne the writer, Eames the actor, Saito the studio, and so on. To carry this analogy further, as Cobb’s team implants a thought in Robert Fischer, Nolan’s team implants a thought in the audience. Indeed, both teams create elaborate stories and hoaxes to implant a thought deep in the minds of their targets. Think about sitting in the theater, watching Inception for the first time. Where did the movie take place? Staring at canisters full of film will not convey any meaning to you about the plot of the film, nor will watching the projector wheels turn. The obvious answer seems to be that the movie took place on the screen. But what’s on the screen is just a collection of shapes and colors; without the appropriate sensory mechanisms, it’s nonsense. Aliens with senses different from ours would likely not be able to make heads or tails of it. Besides, the sound coming out of the speakers is part of the movie, and it’s not on the screen. So where does the movie take place? In our heads—the audience’s mind.

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We experience the movie. In this way, the collective mind of the audience watching the We watched Cobb and Fischer wrestle with their inner demons. We saw the folding city. We filled in the details of the worlds, and we were left wondering, as the top wobbled but continued to spin and the screen cut to black, did it fall? The story, and especially the top itself, was the seed of a thought. Judging from the number of bytes and ink consumed in blogs, magazines, and books such as this one, it is a rich idea (or set of ideas) to contemplate. A collective mind has continued to discuss, study, and debate the movie. Not only are our thoughts stored in this book, but we are adding to a global discussion on reality, mind, and dreams. Right now you are taking part in it. My consciousness might be stuck in my skull, but in a broader sense, my mind and the thoughts and ideas it contains are going through this book to blend with yours. The collective mind considering Inception (or any film, novel, or common cultural artifact, for that matter) is built from the individual minds adding projections and ideas, blended together to think about the philosophical ideas in Inception . Cobb and the team may have had a successful inception into Robert Fischerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind, but Christopher Nolanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inception into the collective mind of the audience appears equally successful. The discussion of the film is not simply a group of individual minds, but a group mind with collective memories and distributed thoughts. Inception guides us to question reality, but it can also help us to question the nature of our own minds, and realize that the traditional limits of skin and skull are perhaps not as accurate and limiting as we commonly think. Our minds extend into the world and blend with one another.

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PHILOSOPHY

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It is nearly obligatory for every discussion of time to repeat the famous quote from the philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine (354–430):

“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.” We all have a sense of time. We sense that a little while has gone by— maybe a minute—or that it’s been a long time since we ate. How long did it take you to read that last sentence? Our sense of time is responsible for keeping us from getting lost in time. It is this sense that gets confused somehow when we dream. We’ve all been in Ariadne’s position: Have I been asleep for five minutes, or an hour? When we lose our sense of time, what have we lost? An obvious answer might be that we’ve lost track of the seconds, or minutes, or hours—but foot—we use inches to measure the width of a desk or how tall we are. So what do seconds and hours measure? The sort of answer we’re looking for might be this: twenty-four hours measure one rotation of Earth around its axis; three hundred and sixty-five and one quarter days measure one revolution of Earth around the Sun.

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The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce) gave a similar, but more general, answer to this question: time is the measure of change. Aristotle realized that change could only be explained in reference to time. One type of change is movement, a change of place. Think of Cobb running down the alley in Mombasa. He has moved if at one point in time he is at the start of the alley and at another point in time he is at the end of the alley. Cobb has moved more quickly than his pursuers if he travels farther in the same amount of time. According to Aristotle, a universe without time would be a universe without movement and without change. If this theory of time makes sense to you, pause and reflect: Is the converse of our last statement true—would an unchanging universe be a timeless universe? If the universe came to a standstill, would time stop? Aristotle’s answer is yes. Time is a property of objects. Just as an object might be red or two feet wide, it might also be present or past. Just as an object can change its colors, so too can an object change times, from future to present to past. This view entails that just as there would be no colors or sizes if there were no colored or large objects, so too there would be no time if there were no present, past, or future objects. Augustine validated Aristotle. Imagine a universe with no objects—no planets, no stars, no light, no sound. Can you imagine time passing in such a universe? It seems so, but only because, Augustine argued, when we try to imagine this sort of nothingness, we are covertly placing ourselves in that timeless, motionless nothingness. Even in this timeless, changeless nothingness, our thoughts are changing and thus time is passing. Augustine concluded that time exists only in our minds and has no reality besides.

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Th e of rise o fav fm or o tha t th for s dern phy var eve er s o y r we by a tation al cen ics in s the don t o m u f ri u s Ne wto ’t co ch a Earth es, h even s o n tee it i n s n n (164 clude twen aroun weve r. F th ce ot ty di 3–1 rot t h m r or n t a ela s ati 7 t i 2 n a one tury t 7) ute xis itse on o tive p thu ime i s t i s h to fE lf d thr tse ing ut thi st no a a sto o o p, b es n rth. E nythi heori lf has ugho t in f , it w s ans ot n zed v wh u spe ut t act u as d wer eth t tim dep ery e g suc ou he is n du end ven h a that t er e it p o year varyi cover t i the s m t sel u n t i e . e p r n h g re i W f o hen ; it c d s c has n n tho the u e revo is “ab slowe an s han niv d l se it ob o u lut tio e e egi ge. e,” down does nni vents rse ha n of , me . Is t ng or for its ppen he pla aning aac s in end n t r h e e ts o a at . Ti t me lity. E ime, r but the ven pas ts ti ses , re start me gar dle and ss of

PHILOSOPHY OF TIME

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Time flies when you’re having fun. Time also flies, I imagine, when a target’s subconscious projections are shooting at you. When we are engrossed in some activity—watching a film, perhaps, or dreaming—we lose track of time. (Ever notice how the second time you watch a movie, it doesn’t seem to take as long?) Time also seems to slow down when we are bored or occupied with some unpleasant activity. When we use expressions like this, we do not mean that events are actually unfolding more rapidly or more slowly. The very premise of this sort of phenomenon belies that interpretation: the reason for our confusion stems from the fact that while time seems to be progressing at the normal rate, in fact a much longer or much shorter time has passed. It is this confounding discrepancy between what seems to be happening and what in fact is happening that gives rise to temporal confusions. If an hour of time seemed to take an hour, even a “faster” or “slower” hour, then time would not surprise us. Recent experiments seem to confirm this explanation. Time does not seem to slow down during exhilarating or harrowing experiences, but when we recall those same experiences afterward, we remember them as taking longer than they in fact did. So when we say that “time flies,” or we feel that some activity is taking forever , what we really mean is that our judgments about time’s passing are mistaken. Our sense of time is not trustworthy in these instances. Yusuf seems to have found a way to reduce this unreliability somewhat. Brand-name Somnacin—the drug responsible for binding dreamers together and allowing dream infiltration—increases brain activity by about ten times. But Yusuf’s Somnacin compound that he utilizes for the Fischer inception speeds up brain activity by twenty times . Within each level of the dream that activity is compounded. Thus the experience of a ten-hour flight to Los Angeles is equal to roughly a week (two hundred hours) in the van level, which is equal to six months (166 days) in the hotel level, and ten years on the snow fortress level (111 months). We are not told in detail how Yusuf’s serum works, but presumably it is able to increase brain activity to very high rates while keeping the dreamer sedated and maintaining all necessary bodily functions.

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Our sense of time is just that—a sense —and it has to involve more than just our beliefs about time. It’s something that we feel or perceive . Compare this to the different experiences of reading a comic book and watching a film. A well-drawn and well-composed comic book can sometimes be as engaging—as action packed—as any film. In one panel Batman swats a vile enemy; in the next that same enemy is bloodied and whimpering on the ground. You know well enough what happened. The villain is on the ground because Batman pounded him. All the same, you do not actually see this happen. Your knowledge is based on an inference, a judgment. Sometimes this is all we mean by a sense of time. Why does Ariadne, once she gets her bearings, believe that Arthur was telling the truth about her having been asleep for only five minutes? Probably because the sun was still up and nothing much in the room had changed. But knowing that five minutes have passed is very different than sensing five minutes pass. What do we sense with our sense of time? Consider the experience of listening to a melody. A note strikes: say the first note of the song the dreamers use to signal the oncoming end of a dream, Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” That note is G. Then you the succession of notes as a succession. This is what it means to hear a melody, rather than to just know that one has been played. One of the hardest problems in philosophy is to understand how this is possible—not just in regards to music, but also in our everyday experience. One intuitive principle, proposed by Aristotle (yes, him again), is that conscious experience is confined to the present. We have memories of the past and expectations for the future, but we only ever experience the present. This principle is hard to square with the experience of something like a melody. For to hear the melody to “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” you must experience not only the third note, F#, but also F# following D following G. Yet by the time F# has struck, D and G are no longer present. How can there be any such “following” experience if Aristotle is correct and experience is confined to the present?

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The American philosopher William James (1842–1910) popularized an answer to this puzzle known as the “specious present.” According to James, the present “is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions.” James’s theory of the specious present purports to explain our sense of time by rejecting Aristotle’s principle that experience is confined to the present. At any given moment, we are aware not only of the present but also of the recent past and the near future; we sense not an instant of time, but a durational spread. The sense of time therefore is the sense not only of the present instant, but of the recent past and near future as well. Establishing just how long that spread might be has been a matter of some controversy over the past century. It has been proposed that the specious present might be as long as two to three seconds, but most theorists today acknowledge a much briefer period, between 40 and 200 milliseconds. The specious-present theory gets something right about time perception but does not explain enough. What it gets right is that, in order to explain our consciousness of temporal phenomena, it must be the case that we actually experience more than just the present instant. The speciouspresent theory claims, for example, that in listening to the melody you are aware of D and G at the same time even though G is no longer present. But if this were all there is to the matter, we would hear a chord, not a melody—and this is not what we hear. When D strikes, you are still sensing G, but you are now sensing G as just-past. You don’t hear G and D at the same time. You hear G-followed-by-D. So something has to happen to G between the time it initially registers and when it is experienced as just-past along with D. The philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)—the founder of an important school of twentieth-century philosophy known as phenomenology—introduced a new concept in order to make sense of this: retention. 8 In our example from “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” when D strikes, you are still aware of G, but that awareness is in the mode of retention . A retention is not a memory. While memory is a mode of consciousness by which we are aware of the past , retention is a feature of our conscious experience of the present . You can experience the present moment without memory, but you cannot experience the present moment without retention.

D PHILOSOPHY OF TIME

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Now let’s make things even more complicated. Melodies play more quickly or more slowly according to their tempo. Tempo measures the number of beats played per minute. One of Nolan and music director Hans Zimmer’s more clever ideas was to slow down the song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and use it as the theme for the movie. That low, rumbling horn blast, which has become one of the signature elements of the film, is in fact just the first notes to Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” played at a much slower tempo. In fact, as Zimmer explained:

all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track. So I could slip into halftime; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time. Now ask yourself: If the melody has a rate or tempo, does the experience of that melody also have a rate? If so, and if a melody can be played more quickly or more slowly, can consciousness play more quickly or more slowly? A melody plays more quickly if more beats are packed into a minute. Might consciousness similarly slow down or speed up? Might consciousness play, as it were, to a faster beat? Might those around you experience time differently, so that what you experience as a day seems like a year to them? Inception suggests that, indeed, conscious experience can speed up or slow down. A week in the van level corresponds to six months on the hotel level, which corresponds to ten years on the snow fortress level. Does this mean that dreamers on the snow fortress level dream faster than dreamers on the van level?

142 PHILOSOPHY OF TIME

In order to make sense of time perception, we should distinguish among three things: the objective duration of an event, the subjective impression of that duration, and the objective duration of that perception itself. We might assume that in normal cases these are all roughly equal. A bolt of lightning streaks across the sky in roughly half a second. We also perceive it as lasting half a second. And we can suppose that the duration of that perception only five minutes, it can seem to one that an hour has gone by. Let’s stick with this distinction between the objective duration of an experience and the subjective impression of duration. What is the relation between these two—between, for instance, how long a dream actually lasts and how long it seems to last? We have two levels to keep track of. On the one hand, we have the experienc ing itself, and on the other, what is experienc ed . To keep track of times on these different levels, let’s refer to the seconds of experienc ing as just “seconds” or “minutes,” and the experienced seconds as “e-seconds” and “e-minutes.” A second is the amount of time that passes in the real world, but an e-second is the amount of time that seems to pass. To return to our example from the film: Ariadne and Cobb enjoy five minutes or sixty e-minutes at the café. This distinction might allow us to make sense of the question “What is the speed of thought?” The speed of thought for Ariadne in her first fabricated dream encounter is twelve e-minutes for every minute. During the Fischer inception, in the snow fortress level, the speed of experience is much faster: just over ten e-months per hour. In Limbo, the speed of thought per minute is (perhaps) e-infinite.

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But now we have the further question: How fast is an “e-second” or an “eminute?” Are e-seconds faster than seconds? There are two difficulties with this sort of question. The first is that we are forced to posit yet another level of time units—e*-seconds, perhaps—to measure the first. One e*-second on the hotel level proceeds at the rate of twenty e-seconds on the van level. This does not lead us into any inconsistencies, but it does complicate matters. We should now be comparing seconds, e-seconds (on the van level), e*-seconds (on the hotel level), e**-seconds (on the snow fortress level) and e***-seconds in Limbo. This allows us to be precise in our comparisons, but it is not clear exactly what we are comparing. The second problem is related to the first: it may make sense to compare e-seconds, e*-seconds, and e**-seconds to seconds, but in the Fischer inception Cobb and his crew must somehow keep track of the relation between e-seconds, e*-seconds, e*-seconds, and even e***-seconds. To make sense of this I suggest that we give up the notion that experienc ed time (for example, e-seconds) has a rate at all. An e-second is how long a second seems to pass, but it is not itself a second long. It is a mistake to conflate the properties of an experience with of durations. At any given moment, I am aware not only of that present instant but also of the just-past and the near future. But now look over that last sentence again: at any given moment —is this “moment” a real moment, an e-moment, or something else? Philosophers refer to this idea—the fact that the experience of duration must involve the awareness of several moments simultaneously—as the Principle of Simultaneous Awareness (PSA). PSA suggests that the duration of which we are aware is not the same as the duration of that awareness itself. Recognizing that experiences themselves have a duration—that I can be aware of being aware, and that this second awareness itself has a duration—does not solve the problem but merely pushes it back a step, and another, and another, apparently without end. The proper way to think about the temporal relation between e-seconds, e*-seconds, and so forth, is to conceive of them as ratios rather than absolute measurements. Many philosophers and physicists suggest that we should take this approach to time in the universe; it is one of the ideas behind relativity theory. The ratio approach is one with which Aristotle would have been familiar: instead of asking how fast Earth moves through space, we ask how fast is Earth moving relative to the observer. There is no fixed rate at which time flows, just ratios of velocity among moving objects.

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Bec au to ask se of the rel at how i tio ive to fast ssue n in a e-s betw an e* n e-s volve -se eco een eco dw c n sec n o t ith ond ds (o hese nd. Y d is. PSA B : ak u nt he one e sufâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ut we , it d ick s but v * f o i s (Yu a s ti c o s me ur hu n lev secon erum an as es no , e for uf on d: o k n d i l n ho t rea tr fac t n e dred ), and (on t t, e w fa lly m ano ess le he va ach e-s h o e st s n n le ak h vel eco t t ee lev ) wo her, v **- otel l ablish an e- e se cog mus el, A el, th nds. rds e nse s sec e v e s Th e rth c t ke ep , th niz the l o a ) is nd is a ur law ond ers ep sam e kic ant e o i l is s f q o l n t o ul of t rac ua nr of equ esp ws u ime e tim ks in k o the h al t l to t relas eac the c o f o e, . w t t o nsi ou el l om e-, e ent tw hl but b e n y the evel d poun *- an vel, a le for ders enty e de t din yd nd a on h *n i t **d E gt oh t ot ing am h s we hap ave es the ow nt econ p o to hap en, a y-to- ds re n the kick lat pen s we one ive snow ra i at to the nitiall tio. o sam y su In o ne the pp ea r dju osed ste , d r at ati o

PHILOSOPHY OF TIME 145

Inception is not only a philosophically rich film, it is a fantastically told story. Like any good story, it needs conflict and drama. The urgency of the plot arises, especially during the Fischer inception, from our worry that Cobb and his crew will not pull off everything in seconds and

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minutes and even years (in Limbo), these are not really seconds, minutes, or years. Despite these complications, Nolan has managed to put together a world in which this all makes sense, and in so doing has proved that philosophy and story can go together in the best of ways.

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DO WE DREAM WHEN WE SLEEP? KEITH DRUMM

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We are told in Inception that there is no more resilient parasite than an idea. It’s highly contagious and almost impossible to eradicate once it’s in the mind. One such idea is that our dreams consist of experiences that occur while we sleep. Consider this exchange between Cobb and Ariadne at the Cafà Debussy:

Cobb: Where are you right now? Ariadne: We’re dreaming? Cobb: You’re actually in the middle of the workshop right now, sleeping. Cobb is telling Ariadne that the dream they are sharing is taking place while they’re asleep. They are perceiving the various sights and sounds of a Paris street from their café table, and thinking and talking about the nature of dreams, all while sleeping. Although what they see and hear is not real, they experience it as though it were real. As Cobb further explains to Ariadne, “When you’re in [a dream], it feels real.” So, according to this view, we can feel the pain of a gunshot, the thrill of being chased by security agents, the sensations of moving weightless through a hotel, and so on, all while we’re asleep. We can also fret over the welfare of our children, contend with our feelings for a deceased spouse, or figure out our father’s true feelings for us, even though we might be sleeping in an airplane’s first-class cabin 30,000 feet in the air. But is this view of dreaming correct?

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Many others beside the characters in Inception hold this idea of dreams. J. Allan Hobson, a prominent dream researcher, wrote that “the most broad, general, and indisputable definition of dreaming [is] mental activity occurring in sleep.” The philosopher Colin McGinn has written recently: “It appears evident that during sleep we have experiences of specific sensory types.” Daniel Dennett, another contemporary philosopher, has labeled this idea the “received view.” It is, of course, an idea held by more than just scientists and philosophers. Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of Inception , seems to hold this view. In fact, most people are infected by this idea of dreaming. In a small book with a suitably succinct title, ing , published in 1959, the philosopher Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) challenged the received view about dreams. He wrote, “If anyone holds that s are identical with, or composed of, thoughts, impressions, feelings, images, and so on… occurring in sleep, then his view is false.” In other words, our dreams are not experiences that we undergo while asleep. It is not the case that while we sleep we have sensory and other sorts of experiences that, if our memory manages to retain them, we can recall upon waking. Malcolm tries to extract this idea from our minds in the most complete way possible. He doesn’t want merely to find and copy it; he wants to remove it entirely from our minds—a kind of anti-inception. Malcolm doesn’t deny that we have dreams, but he believes that scientists, philosophers, and most everyone else goes wrong when they try to explain the basis of dreams, which are actually occur, or we realize that the events—given our beliefs about, for example, how reality works— simply could not have occurred. (For example, if I wake with the impression that I was flying weightless through the halls and rooms of a hotel, I would infer that it belongs to a , because I know I can’t really fly.) We can then recount these events in a dream report to others or to ourselves. Malcolm insists, however, that it is a mistake to further infer that we experienced the events of the dream while we slept. Apart from trying to show that the received view is wrong, Malcolm does not try to explain what dreaming is; as he says, “I do not understand what it would mean to do that.” Rather, he is trying to correct some errors people make in their thinking about dreams. For example, there is the “error that philosophers, psychologists, physiologists and everyone who reflects on the nature of dreams tends to commit, namely, of supposing that a dream must have a definite location and duration in physical time.”

152 DO WE DREAM WHEN WE SLEEP?

The dream extractors in Inception tell us that dream time does not correspond to sleep time. Cobb explains to Ariadne that “in a dream, your mind functions more quickly, therefore time seems to feel more slow.” Arthur adds, “Five minutes in the real world gives you an hour in the dream.” With the especially strong sedative that Yusuf develops, brain function is even more accelerated, so that 10 hours of sleep time will “feel” like a week on the first level of the dream, 6 months on the second level, and 10 years(!) on the third. The characters believe that the dream they will share on the plane while under this sedative will all occur—even though it will feel much longer—within those 10 hours, such that it will begin as soon as they fall asleep, end when they wake up, and take place throughout all ten hours that they are asleep. However, according to Malcolm, “the notions of the location and duration of a in physical time . . . have no clear sense.” While we typically talk about dreams occurring in sleep, Malcolm insists that we should not take this way of talking to indicate temporal location for our dreams. He explains our use of “in sleep” in this way: when we wake up and report our s, we are reporting that various events “took” place; that is, we use the past tense to describe them. They are not events that are transpiring as we report them, as in the case of hallucinations. This explains why we favor the locution “in sleep” when talking about our dreams. But this is just how we happen to “label the above facts, which imply nothing about the occurrence of dreams in physical time.” There appear to be at least two different sets of facts that undermine Malcolm’s view that dreams do not occur in physical time. First, there was the discovery in 1953 of brain activity during sleep. Malcolm discusses the subsequent interest that dream researchers took in a phase of sleep in which the brain is especially active, known as REM sleep (for rapid eye movement). Researchers concluded that dreams occur during this phase of sleep because subjects were more likely to remember their dreams when they were awoken during REM (though dream researchers today believe that dreams can occur during other phases of sleep to correspond to the length of the recorded brain activity.

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According to Malcolm, the results of such experiments do not establish either the temporal location of dreams or their duration. When dreamers report their dreams, they often give what seem like locations in time to them. For example, someone might say that he was having a dream “just before” he woke up or that he had a “very long” dream. Malcolm points out, however, that such reports do not give us “a determination that would be satisfactory to physical science.” It is not something that would allow us to locate the dream “on the clock,” as Malcolm puts it. All that such reports amount to is merely what dreamers are “ inclined to say on waking up.” We have no way of translating these inclinations into DO WE DREAM WHEN WE SLEEP? In fact, dream researchers are willing to admit that their methods do not provide direct observations of the temporal characteristics of dreams. For example, Hobson says: “While recording the state of the brain—by means of brain wave, eye movement, or muscle tone—does not reveal the state of the mind, it can predict mental state with high statistical confidence.” The only thing that would provide any degree of confidence, however, would be an independent means of confirming such “predictions” about dream length. The reports of dreamers cannot do this. Dreamers are only able to provide their impressions about their dreams’ temporal characteristics; these impressions are not measurements of physical time. The characters in Inception clearly understand that these impressions are not reliable indicators of temporal duration. Recall Ariadne’s surprise to learn that she had only been asleep for five minutes even though her conversation with Cobb at the Cafà Debussy seemed to last at least an hour. However, it is never explained in the film how Cobb and the others established the precise rate at which dream activity increases as one moves deeper through duration in physical time. Dream-telling cannot yield that concept.”

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So this research on correlations between brain activity and dream content does not confirm the received view; it presupposes it. It cannot show when and for how long dreaming takes place. Only if we already assume that dreaming occurs while we sleep and for definite periods of time could we accept this research as telling us something about the temporal characteristics of dreams. According to Malcolm, though, there is no way to verify that dreams have these temporal characteristics, so we should

—Dom Cobb

She was possessed by an idea.

abandon this assumption.

The other set of facts that appear to undermine Malcolm’s position is anecdotal evidence about the influence of external stimuli on dream content. People sometimes report dreaming of thunder when a thunderstorm occurred while they slept. Yusuf, on the first level of the inception, dreamed of rain because he had too much free first-class wine and had to urinate. In fact, the influence of external stimuli on dream content is important to Inception ’s plot. Often, “kicks” work when a stimulus on one level is experienced on a lower level. It might seem that the incorporation of “kicks” in a dream can determine a location in physical time for the dream. If the “kick” in waking reality occurs at a particular point in time, we might say that we experienced it in the dream at the same time. For example, if the “kick” occurs at 3:44 a.m., and the dreamer reports the “kick” upon waking, then we might be tempted to say that the er experienced that “kick” in her dream at 3:44 a.m.

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Malcolm doesn’t deny that the contents of dreams can be causally influenced by external events. However, this correlation in content does not permit us to establish temporal correlation. Even if we entertain the notion that dreams occur during sleep, there is no way to establish that the external stimulus was not incorporated by the dream at a later point during sleep and not when it occurred in physical time. Alternatively, the “kick” might have only causally influenced the impression the er has upon waking and not been experienced by the dreamer at any point while she slept. This, in fact, is what Malcolm would prefer saying. (As we will see, he doesn’t think that such “kicks” are ever experienced by the dreamer while asleep.) Some people, however, might still insist that the events of our dreams have to occur at some time because they are events of a particular sort— mental activities. We dream of seeing, feeling, hearing, thinking, and so on. When we do these things while awake, we do them at particular times and for determinate lengths of time; the same must be true of dreams. Malcolm responds by trying to extract from our minds the idea that we perform mental activities while asleep.

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DO WE DREAM WHEN WE SLEEP?

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Now, let’s consider a specific mental activity. Think of Fischer forming the judgment: “My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps.” One thing that could tell Cobb and his team that the inception was successful is Fischer expressing this judgment when he is awake—he opens his eyes and announces, “My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps.” And if he subsequently broke up his father’s company, they’d be sure. But assume they want to know whether he made this judgment while asleep. Eames might see him make the judgment “during” his dream, but whether any dream experiences (including Eames’s) actually occur during sleep is part of the question. So that won’t help. Could the flight attendant, perhaps, tell by observing him while he slept? No. Any observable thing that Fischer did to confirm that he made this judgment would be inconsistent with him being asleep—for example, asserting this judgment, breaking up his father’s company, and so on. As Malcolm puts it, “Whatever in his behavior that showed he was making the judgment Perhaps the flight attendant could observe his brain activity by hooking him up to an EEG. Let’s say scientists have established that every time someone consciously makes the judgment, “My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps,” a certain type of brain activity occurs. Now suppose that the flight attendant observes that tell us about the experience of persons who are awake: The attempt to extend the inductive reasoning to the case of sleeping persons would yield a conclusion that was logically incapable of confirmation. It would be impossible to know whether this conclusion was true or false. If some particular electrical phenomenon occurred in the brain every time a waking subject judged, “My father accepts that I want to create for myself, not follow in his footsteps,” finding the same activity while a subject is asleep would not entitle us to say that he made that judgment while sleeping. Like the anecdotal evidence for the temporal location of dream events, observations of brain activity cannot establish that a judgment was made while sleeping. They might enable us to predict that he will awake believing this judgment, but that he made this judgment while asleep is not something we are entitled to infer.

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So it cannot be observed of Fischer while he is asleep that he is making a judgment. It might, however, be thought that Fischer could report when he wakes up that he made this judgment while asleep. But how could he know this? He couldn’t be aware of both being asleep and making this judgment. What would awareness of being asleep consist of? He can know that he was asleep, sure. Such knowledge, though, is derived from his waking impressions—he remembers lying down to go to sleep and waking up in roughly the same place. There is not, however, an experience of being asleep. When you are asleep, you are unconscious. How could you have a conscious experience of being asleep? A memory of being asleep, therefore, would be one without any content: “The memory of my state of sleep turns out to be an unintelligible notion, since nothing can be plausibly suggested as the content of the memory.” So Fischer cannot remember both that he was asleep and making this judgment. Perhaps Fischer can infer when he awakes that he made the judgment while asleep. For example, he might say that he made it while also perceiving some external stimulus, like the airplane flying through some rough turbulence. But if he perceived the turbulence, then he was not asleep. As Malcolm points out, “Having some conscious experience or other, no matter what, is not what is meant by being asleep.” Maybe he could reason that since he did not hold that judgment before going to sleep, but awoke with it, he must have made it while asleep. Malcolm responds, however, that “it would not follow that he arrived at it before awaking. It would sufficiently describe the facts to say that when he went to sleep he was not of that belief, but that he awoke with the belief. . . . The inference to an intervening judgment is not required.” It would be similarly impossible for Fischer, or anyone, to hearing, believing, thinking, and so on.

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TAKE A LEAP OF A I T H DAVID KYLE JOHNSON

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Let’s begin by avoiding a common confusion. When philosophers talk about “faith,” they don’t mean what people usually do when they talk about having faith in a person . Faith is belief that something is true without sufficient evidence or reason to think that it is true. Faith in a person, however, is having confidence in that person. That confidence is still belief that something is true; you might believe, for example, that it is true that they can do what they have set out to do. But usually you believe this with sufficient evidence; although you may not be sure, most often you have a pretty good indication that they will succeed. Cobb’s team, for example, has faith in him—confidence that he can pull off inception. But this is not belief without sufficient evidence. They’ve had experiences with Cobb that demonstrated his extraction and dreamsharing skills. They don’t have proof that he can perform inception, but they have enough evidence to justify their belief. So it’s not “faith” in the philosophic sense.

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Likewise, consider the belief that your significant other loves you. You can’t know for sure (they could be faking it), but you probably have pretty good indicators. This is not really faith—that is, belief without sufficient evidence. If there is a situation, however, where you really don’t have sufficient evidence—for example, you might have faith in your favorite sports team despite the fact that they have sucked all year—that would require faith, in the philosophic sense. You might believe, without sufficient evidence, that they can win the game. So sometimes faith in (confidence in) something can require faith (belief without sufficient evidence). You might be wondering, however, what counts as sufficient evidence. Just how much are some important distinctions to draw along that continuum that will help us understand what faith is. Rarely, we face situations in which there is no evidence or reasons either way, or where the evidence and reasons perfectly balance out—like it did for Mal and Cobb’s after exiting Limbo. They try to figure out if they are still dreaming, but since their vivid dreams are indistinguishable from the real world (and they both know how Mal’s totem works), they can’t have any evidence either way. No observation they could make would support either theory over the other. They have to take a leap of faith. Cobb has faith that the world is real; Mal takes her leap of faith that it is not, right out the window.

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There are also spots along the continuum where we have reason to think a belief is true—just not very much reason. Yet even when the evidence (overall) is in favor of some belief, if the amount of evidence that favors the belief is small we might still say that to believe it requires faith. (After all, one could remain agnostic, and not believe one way or the other, given that there is so little reason to prefer one belief over the other.) For example, perhaps Cobb didn’t know for sure whether his father-inlaw, Miles, was going to be able to supply him with another architect. Sure he had some idea; given his father-in-law’s line of work and history, it was somewhat more likely than not that he knew someone (like Ariadne) who would make an exceptional architect. If Cobb believed, based on such a small probability, that his father had an architect in waiting, we might say Cobb took a leap of faith by coming to Paris. In another possible scenario, a person has reason to think a belief is false and yet still thinks it is true. Such a person believes despite some evidence to the contrary; this definitely qualifies as faith. Ariadne does this when she returns to be Cobb’s architect. She believes that everything will work out fine despite the fact that she has evidence that it will end disastrously: Cobb’s serious subconscious problems. She even tells us why: “It’s just pure creation.” She ignores her mild reasons for doubt, and believes anyway, because of her fascination with lucid dreaming. She takes a leap of faith. In the examples we have considered so far, it’s not clear whether the person is being rational or not. So, to get a handle on the question of when it is rational to have faith, let’s look at some examples where very clearly it is not rational.

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(P+Q)

Inspired by science, some people claim that faith is always irrational. In response, however, it is pointed out that it seems impossible to do science without faith—specifically, faith in induction , the notion that the future will resemble the past. If sodium and chloride have combined together and produced salt before, we can infer that anytime anyone anywhere puts sodium and chloride together, they will get salt. If certain symptoms have been correlated to a specific disease in the past, and someone displays that set of symptoms, we can conclude they probably have that disease.

Why does belief in induction require faith? Because there is no way to gather evidence or argue for it without assuming it. We might present an argument like this:

Induction has been reliable in the past. Therefore, induction will be reliable in the future.

Notice, though, that this argument is an inductive argument; it infers what the future will be like based on our experience of the past. To even make the argument, you have to already assume the truth of the conclusion—that induction is reliable. This makes the argument circular, and no circular argument can provide sufficient evidence for its conclusion. last. This problem of induction was most famously raised by the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), and is indicative of many similar problems. When we make arguments, we make all kinds of assumptions. We assume modus ponens —that if a conditional (If P then Q) is true, and the antecedent of that conditional is also true (P), then the consequent (Q) must follow. We assume noncontradiction —that nothing can be both true and false at the same time. In short, to make arguments, we have to assume that the basic rules of argumentation are valid. But how could you present an argument for such rules without assuming them? You can’t present an argument for the reliability of arguments without (once again) making a circular argument.

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In general, we might say that anyone who says that “evidence is reliable and it’s never rational to believe anything without it” is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Where is their evidence for their claim that evidence is reliable? If they have none, then they merely assume that evidence is reliable and thus believe it by faith (that is, without evidence) and break their own rule. If they try to provide evidence, they argue in a circle and thus fail to meet their own criteria for believing their own claim. To reason and argue at all, we have to have faith in argument and evidence. However, there doesn’t seem to be anything irrational about doing so. In fact, if you rejected such things (and I’m not even sure you could), there would seem to be something seriously wrong with you. Einstein suggested that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Induction suggests that doing the same thing gets the same results; to not have faith in induction would be insane! If you truly think that the fact that the hot stove burned you last time is not reason to think it will burn you next time, there is something wrong with your head (and very shortly your hand). The same holds for all the rules we have been talking about: modus ponens, noncontradiction. Try to live your life without these rules. Try to find someone who doesn’t. Even primitive societies, which may not even have language to articulate such rules, assume them in their everyday life. Not even the most uncivilized tribesmen would come to the edge of a cliff and think, “Everything else fell, but I won’t.” Everyone believes, in general, in the argumentation. Although belief in the reliability of argument and evidence in general must be taken on faith, that faith is universal. No one disagrees. We couldn’t get along without it. It seems to be hard-wired into us—probably because it has worked so well in the past. So, it seems, there is nothing irrational about faith in argument and evidence itself. 10 But, of course, this does not mean that faith in anything and everything is rational. Contrary to the desires of those who want to believe in Dream Ghosts, regular ghosts, unicorns, and the like, the fact that faith in the reliability of evidence and argumentation is rational does not open up the flood gates and make faith in anything and everything rational. After all, belief in the reliability of evidence and argumentation is hard-wired, uncontroversial, and universally asserted. If a belief is not these things, without evidence one will have a difficult time showing that belief to be rational.

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Can you know that you are not dreaming right now? Many have argued that we can’t. In fact, since the experiences of a vivid lifelike dream are indistinguishable from the experiences of a waking life, we can’t have any evidence either way. Any experience you had would be predicted by both the waking and the dream hypothesis. Again, this seems to be just the situation that Cobb and Mal are in upon exiting Limbo. If so, doesn’t this mean that if we are to believe that the world exists (that we are not ing), we would have to do so by faith? And since that is belief in the existence of a thing, wouldn’t that be irrational—at least, if what I have said so far is right? The answer is no because there is a way to settle the dream question. Although I can’t gather any evidence, per se, to show that I am not ing, I can compare the dream and might think differently if, like Cobb, my profession required me to continually enter vivid dreams, in my current profession the adequacy of the real-world hypothesis presents good enough reason to favor it, and removes the need for faith. In addition, even if belief in the real world did require faith, what I have said so far does not make it irrational. One of the key components that made belief in induction and the rules of argumentation rational was the fact that they are universally shared, and that to reject them would seem to make one insane. The same seems to be true regarding belief in the real world. No one really thinks the world doesn’t exist, and if they did we would lock them away. So belief that the real world exists does not require irrational faith.

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We have concluded that it is not rational to hold a belief without sufficient evidence (by faith), especially on existential matters, unless that belief is uncontroversial and universally shared or the rejection of that belief would indicate insanity. This is our criterion for judging the rationality of belief by faith. By this criterion, however, we would label the examples from the first section irrational. If Cobb believes that Miles will have an architect for him, he’s being irrational. When Ariadne believes that everything will be fine despite Cobb’s dangerous subconscious, she is being irrational. What is nice, however, is that since both rationality and sufficiency are a matter of degree, we can rate these actions accordingly. Sure, it might be irrational to believe that something is true when you have very little evidence for it, but it is not as irrational as believing something is true when you have evidence against it. And it certainly isn’t as irrational as continuing to believe that Matt Damon played Cob. Our criterion may render irrationality unavoidable in some circumstances. Think again of the situation that Cobb and Mal are in after exiting Limbo. There is no evidence to prove who is right. And since they continually enter vivid dreams, the belief that the world is real is not universally held or uncontroversial, and rejecting it would not make one insane. (Mal, in fact, had herself declared sane by three psychiatrists.) Last, in the movie, both notions seem to be equally adequate; they both, for example, leave no questions unanswered. So whether Mal or Cobb believe the world is real or that it is a dream, they will have to do so by faith—the kind of faith that our criterion says is irrational.

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If the criterion implies that sometimes there is no rational choice, must the criterion be wrong? No, even when we set our criterion aside, it’s clear that sometimes there is no rational choice. Consider one of my favorite thought experiments. You’re in hell, and God makes you a deal. For every day you spend in hell, he’ll grant you exponentially more time in heaven. So, one day in hell earns one day in heaven, two earns two. Three, however, gets you four. Four days in hell gets you eight days in heaven, five gets you sixteen, six gets you thirty-two, and so on. When do you cash in? When you have earned a thousand years of heaven time? A million? Maybe a billion? But if you just stay one more day—only one more!—you would double your time, earning just as much time in one day as you have earned all previous days. It doesn’t seem that it would ever be rational to cash in your earned heaven time; staying one more day would always be too valuable—even more valuable than the last time you did it. Yet, clearly, never cashing in your earned heaven time is equally irrational. Thus we seem to have a situation where there is no rational option. This doesn’t mean that you can choose irrationality whenever it suits you. Clearly, if there is a rational option, it’s the one to take. What it does mean is the fact that our criterion entails that sometimes there is no rational option is no reason to reject the criterion. Sometimes, there just is no rational option.

There is still a problem, however. What should we do in circumstances when there isn’t enough evidence to decide the matter—when there is no rational choice? Our criterion doesn’t tell us. 170

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) considered us to be in just such a situation when it came to belief in God, and argued that one should choose belief because it is the better bet. If you believe, you stand to gain everything (heaven) but lose nothing, whereas if you don’t, you stand to lose everything (hell) and gain nothing. His “wager,” however, is one of the most no evidence as Pascal suggests, we have no way of knowing that God wouldn’t prefer and reward disbelief. Maybe that is why he gave us no evidence.) Disbelief is not without reward, either; you will more fully appreciate this life if you think it is the only one you have. But Pascal is right about this: if you are in a situation where evidence cannot decide anything—thus, there is no rational thing to do—it can still be reasonable to choose what is in your best interests. We could liken this to when Saito asks Cobb to take a leap of faith and believe that he can deliver on his promise to get the charges against Cobb dismissed, if Cobb successfully performs inception on Fischer. I don’t think that Cobb has sufficient evidence to believe that Saito can deliver, but given the potential payoffs, it’s worth the risk. It’s not rational, but it’s reasonable for Cobb to attempt inception. It’s even, perhaps, something he should do. But now we are delving into the ethics of belief. What is morally acceptable to believe or disbelieve? William Clifford (1845–1879) argued that it is always morally wrong to have faith, because doing so always risks harm to others (and even yourself). Clifford, I think, overstates his case a bit; certainly my faith in induction harms no one. And faith can’t be morally wrong when it’s unavoidable. What he gets right, however, is that we can’t merely concern ourselves with how our beliefs affect us. Belief is not a private matter. Our beliefs drive our actions and our actions affect others. Most certainly, we should believe what is rational when we can; but we must ask ourselves whether our beliefs will risk harm to others before we decide to believe them by faith.

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This is perhaps why Cobb should not have believed that Saito could deliver on his promise. Sure, it’s worth the risk to Cobb, but this belief informed his decision to perform inception, and that decision put Saito, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, and Yusuf in danger—not to mention Fischer himself. In fact, Cobb violated Fischer’s rights extensively, for his own gain. Cobb’s faith that Saito can deliver is not virtuous, intellectually or ethically. It puts others at risk.

So the next time you are wondering whether to take a leap of faith, ask yourself:

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Am I risking harm to others? Remember, beliefs are not private matters. They affect your actions and your actions affect others. Your faith might even encourage others to believe, and though you would never harm someone because of your belief, can you guarantee others wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t? Have they done so in the past? Faith, like inception, is a risky business. On the other hand, no one ever harmed anyone by proportioning their belief to the evidence.

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UTOPIAN

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LIMBO In the opening sequence of Inception , we see Cobb awash on a nameless beach adjacent to a Japanese mansion. Later, we learn that this beachhead was once the entry point to a having to compromise their tastes. They built their perfect ideal world togetherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a utopia. In fact, the Japanese mansion was apparently Saitoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s version of utopia, where he could live out his days in pure comfort. Everyone, it seems, longs to live in a utopia. But could they? Should they?

CLINT JONES

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Every culture throughout history has produced a vision of an ideal society. Whether it’s an ancient idealization (like Plato’s Republic), a medieval jest (like Thomas More’s [1478–1535] Utopia ), a modern flight of fancy (such as Samuel Butler’s [1835–1902] Erehwon ), a contemporary intentional community (like Twin Oaks), or an enduring belief (like heaven), such “idyllic hope” helps us define what we should be striving for socially. As Max Weber (1864–1920) says, “[Humans] would not have attained the possible unless time and again [they] had reached out for the impossible.” The recurring theme of the idealized utopian future is a consequence of our continuing desire to improve our lives. Its flip side is dystopia, the need to envision the worst possible future as a way to express the dominant fears of the day or dissatisfaction with the status quo. Utopias are places where all is well. Depending, primarily, on who is dreaming up the utopia in question, all being well might encompass some extravagant notions like “you never have to change your socks / and little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks.” Other utopian models merely strive to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. Dystopias, however, are not merely the opposite of utopias. They are more like attempted utopias gone bad; they can share many facets of a utopian worldview but simply emphasize the negative aspects of such a world. Often, when people talk of dystopian futures they confuse the idea with something far more terrible. Take, for instance, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006). Some would describe it as dystopian, but it isn’t. It’s post-apocalyptic. The key difference between McCarthy’s future and, say, a real dystopia like Aldous Huxley’s (1894–1963) Brave New World , is that in a dystopia, like Huxley’s, there is a small class of people (usually the powerful) for whom the society is one they would gladly live in. No such class exists in The Road . We might say that a post-apocalyptic world is one we can’t change—it’s already doomed—whereas a dystopian state could be improved.

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You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you. But you can’t know for sure. But it doesn’t matter—how can it not matter? —Mal’s riddle

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Our stories about utopia and dystopia can tell us a lot about ourselves, and Inception is no exception. Such stories, or narratives, tell us about what kind of world we really want—our idyllic hope. They also function as a social critique, telling us what we see as wrong with our current world. By looking at what motivates the team to incept Fischer and avoid falling into Limbo in the process, we can examine the difficulties of utopian narratives. We can also look specifically at the paradox of Utopia—the fact we strive for the perfect world, but we would never really want to live there.

Limbo is an obvious example of a utopia in Inception , but where might one find a dystopia in Inception? After all, with the exception of mind invasion technologies, the world of Inception is readily recognizable. There is, however, one seemingly innocuous difference: corporations are beginning to dominate the world. Like its predecessors, Inception deals with questions surrounding the best possible future by playing on current social fears of a corporate state. It presents a glimpse into a harrowing future where our energy supply, and the corporations that control it, are redefining the social and political landscape by jockeying for control of energy resources and influencing government policy. Saito’s promise to eliminate the charges against Cobb with a single phone call is a testimony to the power of such companies. To get Cobb pulled from a most wanted list, he can’t just call some lackey at the State Department; he’s pulling the strings of someone in the uppermost echelons of government.

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The future Inception depicts is quite bleak. Saito’s company is the last one that stands between the Fischer-Morrow energy conglomerate and “total energy dominance,” but Saito’s company can no longer compete. If Robert Fischer does not break up his father’s company, he will soon be in possession of his own corporate global superpower—one that controls the world’s energy supply. The implications of such a possibility are precisely what make the setting of the movie seem dystopic. The dystopian elements are clearer in the graphic novel. Cobol Engineering (along with Saito’s own company, Proclus Global, and presumably Fischer-Morrow) wields considerable power and political influence using tactics that are not, as Cobb later tells Ariadne, “strictly speaking, legal.” They answer to their own authority. The most utopian element of the movie is Limbo—“unconstructed dream space.” In this lowest level of subconscious dream space, one can create for oneself an ideal world, or, like Dom and Mal, share the dream and create an ideal world together. Living in such a world would seem desirable. In fact, the theme of desire for a utopia, or at least a better world, runs throughout the film. Recall the team’s first meeting with the chemist Yusuf. In the basement of his apothecary shop, a group of people gathers every day to share a dream. In the real world they sleep for four hours, but Yusuf’s compound provides them with forty hours of dream time. So they spend twice as much time dreaming as they do awake. This is why Yusuf’s assistant claims, “They do not come to sleep, but to be woken up.” What, other than an idyllic existence, could compel people to do such a thing? The dream they share must be better than the reality they actually inhabit. In fact, “The dream has become their reality.” They have not opted for an altered reality, but rather an alternative, more utopian, reality.

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Now think about when Ariadne storms off, after being “killed” by Cobb’s projection of Mal in the training dream. Cobb confidently tells Arthur that “she’ll be back—reality won’t be enough for her anymore.” Apparently, even the most basic level of dreaming can become preferable to reality. Ariadne’s reasons are very different from those of the people sleeping in the chemist’s basement yet both cases reveal why idyllic hope is valuable to us. For Ariadne it’s the pure creativity and godlike powers; for Yusuf’s customers it’s the ability to escape the drudgery of their lives. Once we have a vision of a better world, we can’t help but prefer it.

Yet, during the Fischer inception, the prospect of finding themselves in Limbo leads to a heated quarrel among key members of the inception team. Dying on any level will, thanks to Yusuf’s sedative, automatically land them in Limbo. Echoing Virgil’s directions to Dante at the beginning of the Divine Comedy , Cobb says that “downwards is the only way forwards,” strengthening the resolve of the group. But why are they so terrified of living in a utopia? Eames suggests that it’s because they don’t want scrambled eggs for brains. Limbo is undesirable for a few more reasons than that, though. The first reason is simple. One can get lost in Limbo; it’s a bit like prison in that it is a place from which it is difficult to escape. When the characters speak of Limbo, they talk about being “trapped” or “lost,” and Ariadne argues with Cobb about the “risk the others have taken” just by joining him in the dream state. Cobb warns Saito that if he is killed and drops into Limbo, he will get stuck down there, lost, because he will forget the real world . Clearly, the prospect of getting trapped in a fake world, believing it is real, and thus never of imperfection. Ultimately, the most frightening thing about Limbo is that it’s a shared state. This might work out well for a married couple, like Mal and Cobb, who can come to an agreement about what an ideal existence is like. But if you shared Limbo and tried to make an ideal world with someone whose vision of an ideal world was radically different from yours, Limbo might turn out to be hell. In fact, inhabiting someone else’s utopia is a prospect our characters worry about. “What the hell is down there?” Ariadne asks. “Nothing is down there,” Arthur replies, “except for whatever might have been left behind by anyone sharing the dream who’s been trapped there before. Which, in our case, is just [Cobb].” So, in many ways, the most utopian element of the story is also dystopic. We ourselves may, ultimately, want to avoid utopia for similar reasons.

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Think about your ideal world; what would it take to make it truly perfect? You might start simply enough, but the more you think about it, the more details you will add, and the more you will realize how much utopia requires. The problem is that as we develop those ideas, just like multilayered dreams, their complexity makes them unstable. The more complex the utopian vision, the less likely it is to stand up to criticism or be appealing to others. As one adds details specific to one’s own vision of utopia, one creates space for others to find fault. In George Orwell’s 1984 , the protagonist, Winston Smith, is quite unhappy with society, and yet the society itself is meant to be a utopia. The same is true of More’s Utopia , where everything is taken care of for the inhabitants—they are provided all of their food and clothing, have a reasonably short work day, and so on. All of these utopian perks come at great cost to the citizens themselves in terms of personal freedom. So one reason we may not truly desire utopia is that we are afraid that it won’t be our ideal, and may in fact be our own personal hell. The cost of “perfection” may actually make a world that is perfect for everyone impossible.

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Who wants to be stuck in a dream? Though we might be inclined to give up on utopias at this point, Inception gives us a reason to continue dreaming. The characters work to prevent their dystopic reality from getting worse while simultaneously striving to avoid being trapped in a utopic Limbo. Utopian and dystopian ideas are often the product of augmenting the extremes of what is desirable and undesirable in society. So idyllic hope reminds us that by approaching the extremes of the best and worst imaginable, we can achieve social change. Staying where we are a utopia, which we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even want to fully reach, helps us improve our world for the better. As he and Ariadne search for Mal, Cobb indicates that he knows where sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be. When they arrive at the building, he explains to a befuddled Ariadne that he and Mal had always wanted a house, but they loved that particular type of building. In the real world they would have to choose one or the other, but not in Limbo, where the imagination is the limit. The same is true of utopian thinking in our society. We are only limited by what we can dream, and dreaming about a better society or about how to avoid a disastrous dystopic future motivates us to make relevant changes.

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Social change is slow to occur, though, because it takes a lot of time and energy to create a communicable utopian vision that others wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t reject. On the one hand, a simple version of an idyllic future is often unappealing because it is too bland or too vague to convince people to think of the possibilities it affords them. On the other hand, a complex version of an idyllic future has many potential problems and will not appeal to everyone. What is perfect for one person is imperfect for another. This leaves us with a challenging question: If complexity means that people are less likely to share your vision of the future and simplicity isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t compelling, then what are we to make of the most pervasive utopian vision of allâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;heaven?

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When Ariadne poses the question “Who’d want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?” Yusuf immediately replies that “it depends on the dream.” Like Yusuf, most people could think of a dream state they wouldn’t mind being stuck in for years, but that’s not the issue when it comes to utopias. Consider heaven. If heaven lasts forever, one eventually would become bored, tired of living an idyllic existence, and would want to opt out. Without the ability to opt out, however, heaven would become hell. This is exactly the problem that Julian Barnes deals with in his most popular novel, A History of the World in 10 Chapters . In the final chapter, aptly titled “The Dream,” the get through in eighteen strokes. He meets all the famous people he’s ever been interested in and some others just for fun. He eats, drinks, shops, copulates, learns every new activity he can think of (after golf becomes a bore), and finds that every whim is catered to, immediately, without question or fail. He eventually realizes that “they even make the bad things good,” so that no experience is unpleasant. This is especially true of hell, which is a theme park of sorts that heaveners can visit; it provides a “good scare . . . as opposed to a bad scare.” After a considerable amount of time (the dreamer loses track fairly quickly), perfection becomes routine and boring. The things he didn’t enjoy in life, like reading, bring little or no pleasure in heaven, and his attempts to pursue those things do nothing to alleviate his boredom. This is the problem of heaven—eventually we would want out. And this fits with Ariadne’s horror at being stuck in a dream. When we talk about heaven, it is always its simplest form, never with specificity, somehow always vague—the land of milk and honey, the pearly gates and golden streets. It’s idyllic and can be whatever you want. But the idea of heaven is not simple; no idea is, as Cobb is quick to inform Saito during their exchange in the helicopter. It requires a lot of faith and a lot of work to maintain a belief in heaven. Once someone starts to put details in place beyond the basic features, people start to disagree about what ought to be included. This, then, is the paradox of idyllic hope. On the one hand, any particular utopia is only going to appeal to a small group of people (perhaps only one person), and though we continually strive for it, no amount of work is going to bring it into existence. On the other hand, if, like heaven in Barnes’s story, utopia could be what each person wanted, given enough time everyone would opt out because heaven would become hell. UTOPIAN LIMBO

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If Ariadne is correct that it would be difficult to spend even ten years of accelerated time in a , then how could we ever spend an eternity in such a place? The land of milk and honey is appealing precisely because that’s where the description stops; everyone is allowed to fill in the gaps for themselves. That’s the appeal. We are under no obligation to tell people how we fill in the gaps—even Barnes’s dreamer discovers that there is a confidentiality rule things). If you could not be woken up, if you could not escape the perfection of the ideal, you might, like Cobb, start to feel cooped up. Your brain might even turn to scrabbled eggs, as Eames suggests. Idyllic hope allows us to challenge entrenched notions of how the world is and how it could be. Without hope, expressed in the form of utopian visions, human society would stagnate. We need to imagine tomorrow because that is how we learn what we want to change about the present. Understood in this way, Limbo becomes more than just another level of subconscious dreaming; it is the perfect temporary escape from an increasingly dystopic reality. Contemplating Limbo provides the best method for understanding the complex and slippery nature of idyllic hope and the human relationship to the ideal world. It also allows us to provide a better answer to Mal’s riddle. Cobb’s answer to “how can it not matter?” is that “we’ll be together.” But we already know this isn’t true. The better answer is because wherever the train takes us, eventually we’ll want to leave.

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PARADOX TYLER SHORES

Shall we take a look at some paradoxical architecture? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Arthur

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Thinking and dreaming about the impossible spurs our imagination and encourages us to question the boundaries of what is possible. Inception is compelling because it takes impossibilities and paradoxes for granted. “In a dream you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes. That lets you create closed loops. Like the Penrose steps. An infinite Paradox.” The Penrose steps are not the only paradox in Inception , of course. Consider the very act of dreaming itself: you dream while sleeping, and thus while you are unconscious. Yet you are having experiences, and therefore must be conscious. Dreaming itself seems to be a paradox. Thinking and dreaming about the impossible spurs our imagination and encourages us to question the boundaries of what is possible. Inception is compelling because it takes impossibilities and paradoxes for granted. “In a dream you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes. That lets you create closed loops. Like the Penrose steps. An infinite Paradox.” The Penrose steps are not the only paradox in Inception , of course. Consider the very act of dreaming itself: you dream while sleeping, and thus while you are unconscious. Yet you are having experiences, and therefore must be conscious. Dreaming itself seems to be a paradox.

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But what are paradoxes exactly? Are they really possible? What might we learn from them? And what other paradoxes does Inception invoke?

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At least one critic wondered if Christopher Nolan’s film seemed to run the risk of being “too literal, too logical, too rule-bound.” in fact, Inception is anything but.

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an apparently unacceptable conclusion [is] derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises. Appearances have to deceive, since the acceptable cannot lead by acceptable steps to the unacceptable. So, generally, we have a choice: either the conclusion is not really unacceptable, or else the starting point, or the reasoning, has some non-obvious flaw.

A paradox might be understood as something that, on its face, seems possible but when examined is logically contradictory. Consider, for example: “There is a town in which all the men are clean-shaven; one of those men is a male barber who shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves.” At first this seems sensible, but upon examination we realize it entails that the barber both does, and does not, shave himself. This is a logical contradiction. And if paradoxes are paradoxes because they are logically contradictory, then they can’t exist. Perhaps, however, paradoxes are more than this: perhaps they are something that seems contradictory, but upon examination is not. Richard Sainsbury suggests something along this line. A paradox is when:

With both Inception and paradox, things are not always as they may appear to be. What seems to be an obviously false conclusion can’t follow from unquestionable premises with unfaltering validity. There must be a mistake somewhere. Either the conclusion isn’t false, the premises aren’t unquestionable, or the reasoning isn’t valid. For example, consider the birthday paradox. If you have fifty people in a room, what is the probability that two of them celebrate their birthday on the same day? Since there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, it would seem low. Maybe one in seven? Nope. It’s actually 97 percent likely. This up in a group of fifty, the chances that two of them won’t match are very low.

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Often, it is vagueness or ambiguity that leads to such paradoxes. For example, suppose I enter the lottery. Can I know that I will not win? The chances are so low, it seems that I can know it. The chances are that low for everyone, though. And not everyone can know they won’t win, because someone will. Paradox? Again, not exactly. The resolution comes in simply clarifying our terms. Classically, “knowledge” is defined as justified true belief, and everyone who won’t win is justified in believing so—so they know. The person who will win is justified in believing they won’t win, too; it just turns out they are wrong. Thus, they don’t have true belief and lack knowledge. But if knowledge requires certainty, then it turns out that my initial instinct was wrong; I can’t know that I won’t win and neither can anyone else. We resolve the paradox by clarifying what we mean by “know.” That changes the way we view the paradox, and the seeming contradiction disappears. We find a visual example in Arthur’s hotel dream. One of M. C. Escher’s most famous works is a drawing of a set of stairs made up of four 90-degree right angles that seem to be simultaneously ever-ascending and ever-descending. Such Penrose steps leave us with the impression that “there is a conflict between the finite and the infinite, and hence a strong sense of paradox.” But the conflict can be resolved with a change of perspective. One of Fischer’s projections chases Arthur into a stairwell. We get an overhead camera angle as Arthur appears to run down and away from the projection, only to find Arthur appearing behind him. The camera angle suddenly shifts to reveal a precipitous drop and abrupt end to the staircase. “Paradox,” Arthur says before pushing the guard over the edge. The sense of paradox is produced by one’s perspective: the illusion of paradox is only successfully brought about when looked at in a certain way. The paradox is resolved when we realize that the appearance of a threedimensional endless staircase can only be produced in two dimensions. A three-dimensional endless staircase can not exist.

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There is a distinction that we should be careful to make, however, between a paradox and a thing that may well appear to be paradoxical, but ultimately only “grazes paradoxicality.” 8 There are many everyday instances of the latter, things that we intuitively grasp as being kind-of-true and kind-of-not-true at the same time. In the opening pages of a book, for instance, you might find a blank page that has the contradictory statement: “This page intentionally left blank.” Can a page that includes words describing its own blankness really be blank? It seems not, yet there it is . . . sort of. This paradox is easily resolved when we realize that the meaning of the sentence is, “The fact that there is nothing on this page, besides this sentence, is not an oversight.” Intuitively we should understand that this is different from “The sentence inside these quotes is false.” If the sentence is true, it is false; but it if it false, it is true. Contradictions can’t be true, yet it is a basic rule of logic that sentences can’t lack a truth value. This is commonly called “the Liar Paradox,” and it doesn’t seem that it can be resolved by clarifying an ambiguity. The sentence can only be understood in one way. (A popular science fiction trope employs such logical paradoxes; Captain Kirk used it often, effectively, to defeat androids.) Solutions to this paradox have been proposed, but we won’t get sidetracked with them here. The point is, the Liar Paradox does not merely “graze paradoxicality.”

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If paradoxes canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be true, or if they merely turn on an ambiguity, what is the point in thinking about them? Often in philosophy what is important is not the answer, but the process of posing the question and thinking about an answer. Appreciating the value of paradox helps us to appreciate the value of philosophy itself. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1995) suggests in his book Difference and Repetition ,

Philosophy is revealed not by good sense but by paradox. Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy. . . . Subjectively, paradox breaks up the common exercise of the faculties and places each before its own limit, before its incomparable: thought before the unthinkable which it alone is nevertheless capable of thinking. For Deleuze, paradox represents both the most enlightening and the most mystifying elements of philosophical thinking at the same time. The kinds of thinking that we find ourselves doing in philosophy can be a welcome change from the humdrum reasoning we rely upon in our dayto-day lives, much in the same way that the gravity-defying, perspectiveskewing science fictional elements of Inception are a welcome change from our own lived reality. Those same fantastical elements can even whet our philosophical appetites for thoughts that we might not otherwise have opportunity to consider.

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For philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), contradictions and paradoxical thinking can have a certain unique value:

Among the things that can reduce a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for mankind, and that much good proceeds from the illogical. . . . Even the most rational man from time to time needs to cover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship with all things. Embrace of the illogical, Nietzsche advises us, can be an occasion to shake ourselves free from our accustomed habits of thinking, and lead us to greater insights and what might ordinarily we cannot help but take for granted. Paradox, in this way, speaks to our non-rational sentiments—it serves as a way for us to come to terms with seemingly irreducibly complex ideas. Paradox can provide a way to embrace self-contradiction as a means to greater self-understanding, Arthur’s Penrose steps—which seem to be without beginning or end— are a useful metaphor for how we might think about Inception as a whole. In Inception we have a film that seems to begin in one dream and (perhaps) end in another , providing a mazelike, never-ending quality that is beguiling (and perhaps some-what confusing). This dream-within-adream aspect of Inception presents us with another paradox: the paradox of dreaming.

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Inception is a film about dreams, and dreams are experiences had while sleeping. But how could we be asleep, and thus unconscious, yet at the same time be consciously aware of experiences? This we might call “the paradox of dreaming.” To resolve this paradox, sleep researcher Michel Jouvet, in his book The Paradox of Sleep , suggests that there is a third distinguishable mental state between those of waking and sleeping—what he calls “paradoxical sleep”—in which the brain exhibits traits of both mental states at the same time. Such thinking may contradict our long-understood notions of waking and sleeping states of consciousness, but it could resolve the paradox. These states of consciousness may be less distinct than originally thought and overlap in previously undiscovered ways. And this is not the only way to resolve it. In Inception , we find characters within a shared dream who are able to consciously control their own actions while inhabiting the dreams of others. For researchers who study sleep, the ability to consciously control behavior represents a significant distinction between the mental experiences of sleeping and of waking. On the one hand, we have “primary consciousness,” which is related to primary, unreflective cognitive processes such as perception and emotion. On the other hand, we have “secondary consciousness,” which involves the more complex and abstract thinking associated with activities such as language and self-awareness. For J. Allan Hobson, a longtime Harvard sleep and dream researcher, this has important implications for our understanding of the science of consciousness, and resolving the dream paradox: Waking consciousness may consist of . . . secondary consciousness as well as primary consciousness. Primary consciousness has recently been proposed by us to be characteristic of dreaming. Put another way, waking, by including secondary consciousness, is characterized by higher orders of insight, abstraction, and awareness of awareness, precisely those attributes which dreaming normally lacks. Dreams have strong primary consciousness elements. They include a strong sense of self, of self-as-agent, and movement of that self-agent through a perceptual space.

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By thinking about consciousness differently—instead of as something that can either be simply “on” or “off”—we can resolve the paradox. Waking involves two kinds of consciousness, but if sleeping only deprives us of one kind of consciousness, conscious experiences can still be had while sleeping. In short, the paradox is resolved when we realize that describing sleep as a state of unconsciousness is too simplistic. Normally, while dreaming, we serve as the unwitting marks of a dreamcon of our own making; we get caught up within the plot of the dream, oblivious to the fact that it is a dream, and are unable to do anything about it until the dream reaches its end. But sometimes we become lucid; we become consciously aware of the fact that we are dreaming, and we are thus able to consciously influence the content of the dream. Cobb and his team experience their dreams in this way. This might sound paradoxical because lucid dreaming would seem to be dreaming that involves, as in our waking life, activity of second-order consciousness such as awareness of awareness. How can we have waking experiences while asleep? But, actually, this only “grazes paradoxicality.” It’s doubtful that every aspect of second-order consciousness can be experienced in a lucid dream, or can be experienced to the same degree. And even if they could be, such lucid dreams would seem to present no more of a paradox than an experience machine, like the Matrix, for example. If you fed your brain false signals, you could produce “waking experiences” of things that seem real, even though they are not in fact real and you know they are not. In a lucid dream, your brain simply does this to itself; it is its own experience machine.

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In thinking about things such as the Penrose steps and dreams within dreams, we can’t help but feel a certain circular, mazelike quality to Inception. Douglas Hofstadter, in his fascinating book I Am a Strange Loop , introduces a new and complicated idea for us to consider in the context of Inception ’s dreams: the strange loop.

What I mean by “strange loop” is . . . an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or loop. Hofstadter further elaborates by describing another M. C. Escher illustration, called Drawing Hands. In this drawing, a right hand and a left hand appear to be drawing each other into existence, a never-ending loop in which the beginning and ending points are indeterminable. That sense of appearing to move from one level to another level itself mirrors the central mystery of Inception —Cobb has moved up and out of Limbo. Or has he? His attempts to get out may have landed him right back where he started. A strange loop, as Hofstadter describes, consists of a hierarchy of levels that are inextricably linked to one another, much in the same way that actions at one Inception level are linked to other levels further down. Where the “strangeness” comes in, however, is in the fact that in a strange loop the hierarchy is tangled; the difference between higher and lower, up and down, becomes confused, blurred, or indistinguishable, and the ending point paradoxically becomes the starting point. When planning out the inception, Eames and Arthur touch upon aspects of strange looping.

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Eames: So now in the first layer of the dream, I can impersonate Browning, and suggest concepts to Fischer’s conscious mind. Then, when we take him a level deeper, his own projection of Browning should, should feed that right back to him. Arthur: So he gives himself the idea. Eames: Precisely. That’s the only way it will stick. It has to seem selfgenerated.

The plan is an example of what Hofstadter calls “downward causality,” which muddles the relationship between cause and effect: an idea caused by Eames and Arthur must seem to be caused by Fischer’s own subconscious. The key to accomplishing this act of idea-altering turns out to be quite similar to what we’ve already seen in Nietzsche’s earlier appeal to irrationality. As Cobb explains: “The subconscious is motivated by emotion, right? Not reason. We need to find a way to translate this into an emotional concept.” For the inception con to be successful, they must plant an idea (“I will split up my father’s empire”) at one level of Fischer’s consciousness that will manifest itself as a self-generated thought on a lower level of subconsciousness (“My father accepts that I want to create for myself”). How can one idea be turned into something completely different (or, as Arthur poses that all-important question about human nature: “How do you translate a business strategy into an emotion?”)? The answer is found by thinking about another loop, another paradox: the does change something in the mind which contemplates it.”

And these are not the only paradoxical loops in Inception .

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The philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) identifies what he calls “the paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.” 18 This paradoxical duality allows us to observe the world, but also observe ourselves as a part of it. The idea of our selves as both objects and subjects of thoughts is part of how the dream worlds in Inception are populated:

Ariadne: Who are the people? Cobb: Projections of my subconscious. Ariadne: Yours? Cobb: Yes. Remember, you are the dreamer. You build this world. I am the subject, my mind populates it. You can literally talk to my subconscious. That’s one of the ways we extract information from the subject.

Although this paradox doesn’t seem all that “paradoxical,” this is a rather important point for us to understand. Instead of the dreamer and the subject being one and the same person, here we find the roles split between two people—Ariadne is the dreamer, Cobb is the subject. The projections are simultaneously objects within the dream and part of the subject. In terms of consciousness, this represents its own loop: the dreamer is aware that the dream characters are part of the dream, yet as things are altered in the dream world, the “people” pay increasingly more attention to that dream interloper’s presence. A dreamer becomes aware of his own self within the dream—a moment of self-perception that Hofstadter identifies as a property of strange loops: “a kind of selfreferential operation, the twisting back of a concept on itself.”

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If the architect makes herself too obvious, by tinkering too much with the dream, things could turn out badly.

Ariadne: Why are they all looking at me?

Cobb: Because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you. cells fighting an infection.

Ariadne: What, they’re going to attack us?

Cobb: No, no. Just you.

But this brings to mind yet another loop. As we learn, Cobb’s projections don’t just threaten and attack Ariadne; they threaten and attack him. His own projection of Mal challenges his worldview: “No creeping doubts? Not feeling persecuted, Dom? Chased around the globe by anonymous corporations and police forces, the way the projections persecute the dreamer?” Shortly after this challenge, Mal stabs him with a kitchen knife, as she did Ariadne in an earlier scene. Mal’s antagonism is a continual obstacle for Cobb throughout the film. In essence, Cobb’s mind has turned against itself. What a strange loop.

PARADOX 207

Inception is very much about the things the mind creates, ranging from fantastic, physics-bending projections of Mal. Cobb describes dreambuilding as “the chance to build cathedrals, entire cities, things that never existed, things that couldn’t exist in the real world.” Of course, we build dreams ourselves, but examining how we do so gives rise to yet more loops, and more paradox. During one of the more provocative exchanges in the film, Cobb and Ariadne discuss the mechanics of creating a dream world, in which

Cobb: Well, imagine you’re designing a building. You consciously create each aspect. But sometimes, it feels like it’s almost creating itself, if you know what I mean. Ariadne: Yeah, yeah, like I’m discovering it. Cobb: Genuine inspiration, right? Now, in a dream our mind continuously does this. We create and perceive our world simultaneously. And our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening.

invention and discovery somehow become simultaneous operations.

idea of creating and perceiving something simultaneously seems paradoxical—especially if that perception is discovery. How can I discover something that I myself created? How, if I am creating my dream, can I be surprised by parts of it, and not know what will happen next? As Cobb sketches this idea—two curved arrows, pointing at each other’s non-pointed ends—perceiving begets creation, which in turn feeds back into more linear process of getting from one point to another, and instead is more like a feedback loop.

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In Inception , characters are able to experience the contents of their dream experiences as they happen. For our own (non-lucid) dreaming experiences, we can only experience our dreams as remembered events when awake. In the film, Cobb blurs that line between the contents of memories and created ideas, which, as we find out, spells trouble. Ariadne: These aren’t just dreams. These are memories. And you said never to use memories. Cobb: I know I did. Ariadne: You’re trying to keep her alive. You can’t let her go. Cobb: You don’t understand. These are moments I regret. They’re memories that I have to change. Memory and imagination have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, imagination by its very nature draws upon our remembered experiences, taking what we already know and transmuting it into a newly created and discovered something else. On the other hand, the distinctions between our memories and what might simply be imagined memories seem at times to be indistinguishable. Separating memory and imagination becomes a paradoxical task: Paradox is not on the side of memory but of imagination. This is the case because imagination has two functions: one is to bring us outside of the real world—into unreal or possible worlds—but it has a second function which is to put memories before our eyes.

Paradox is not on the side of memory but of imagination. This is the case because imagination has two functions: one is to bring us outside of the real world—into unreal or possible worlds—but it has a second function which is to put memories before our eyes. PARADOX 209

Cobb’s rule, “Never re-create places from your memory. Always imagine new places,” seems to reverse this relationship. Imagination becomes part of the inner world of the dreamers in Inception .

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The solution may lie in asking ourselves: what are memories without imagination? What would imagination be without memories? Like Cobb’s loop between perceiving and creating, and like Escher’s Drawing Hands , it can seem impossible to find that dividing line between where memory ends and imagination begins. Perhaps, despite what Cobb wants to believe, with memory and imagination (and, as we saw before, consciousness) it is too simple to think of them in terms of only two possibilities— either “on” or “off.” Even imagination, with its ability to take us from the possible to the impossible, has its limits, as Cobb finally forces himself to realize when he confronts Mal. “I can’t imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you . . . you’re just a shade of my real wife and you’re the best I can do, but I’m sorry, but you’re just not good enough.”

PARADOX

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Philosophy can be a venture into the great unknown, and this can be a strangely liberating experience. In thinking about paradox, Sòren Kierkegaard (1813– 1855) remarked: “It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are.” We feel compelled to think about paradox as a way of thinking about the limits of what we understand. And even when we reach the limits of our thinking, when we contemplate the ununderstandable, Kierkegaard, in thinking about the paradoxes of 212

the finite and the infinite, ultimately felt that a leap of faith was an acceptable conclusion. Significantly, Mal at a pivotal moment tells Cobb: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m asking you to take a leap of faith.â&#x20AC;? More significantly still, Mal herself did take a literal leap of faith, when she jumped from the hotel window. Where a leap of faith will take us is the great mystery that thrills us in both Inception and in philosophy.

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APPENDIX

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One thing that makes Inception so amazing is that after watching it a fifth time, you realize that all the vexing questions you had the first time don’t matter; you missed too much. “Does the top fall?” Who cares! Even if it does, Cobb could still be dreaming. There are many secrets, hidden in the safe, that you may have missed. We scanned the movie, the script, special features, interviews, and the Internet. Here is a list of a few cool things we discovered.

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Eames “forges” the distracting sexy blonde in the hotel dream. While in the elevator with Saito, as the blonde, Eames’s layered reflection reveals his identity (a few layers down). The violent projections in the Snow Fortress are Fischer’s. He is the subject. Saito is ninety when Cobb finds him in Limbo, so Saito spent at least forty years in Limbo. Cobb spinning the top in Mal’s dollhouse safe, according to Nolan, symbolically represents Cobb’s inception of Mal—an event that happens off screen. A totem can only tell you that you are not in someone else’s dream, Arthur tells us. Why? Totems work in the following way: if you are in someone else’s dream, they create all the physical objects in the dream—including your totem. So, if you use your totem in someone else’s dream, it will behave as they expect it to. If they do not know the special way it behaves in the real world, they cannot make it behave as you know it should. So, if it does not behave as you know it should, then you know you are in someone else’s dream. However, since you know how it should behave, your totem cannot tell you that you are not in your own dream. If you are the dreamer, the dream version of your totem (that you create) would likely behave as it should in the real world. Arthur’s totem is a loaded die; only he knows how it will fall in the real world. A dreamer would produce a non-weighted die. Ariadne’s totem is a bishop chess piece. It is not clear how its movement is unique, but given what she does with it in the film, it’s likely that she has weighted it such that when it tips over, it will roll and come to rest in a particular way—perhaps, with the bishop’s hat facing down. Eames’s totem seems to be a poker chip—although there is no indication of how it works. Saito and Yusuf do not appear to have totems.

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“Cobb” means “dream” in Urdu, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Punjabi. (HM) “Cobb” may be a reference to a character in The Prisoner , a British television series Nolan wanted to adapt for the big screen. (RB) As spelled on his plane ticket, Cobb’s first name is Dominick (with a “k”). (BR) Ariadne, in Greek mythology, guided her brother Theseus through the labyrinth to defeat the Minotaur. The Labyrinth was circular. Recall the maze Ariadne drew to pass Cobb’s test. “Mal” is French for “bad.” One line in “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” even uses the world “mal” in reference to “bad things” the singer has done, that she does not regret. “Mal” has similar connotations in Spanish and English, because of its Latin root. “Arthur” can mean “rock” in English. Arthur is especially grounded in reality, and attempts to keep Cobb that way. “Saito” in Japanese is “purifying flower.” Saito cleanses the impurities from Cobb’s record. Saito’s company is called “Proclus Global.” Proclus was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher who kept the school at Athens alive, somewhat like Saito keeps the energy industry alive by preventing the Fischer empire from monopolizing it. Eames is likely, given the emphasis in architecture in the film, named after Charles Eames and Bernice Alexandra “Ray” Eames, a married couple who made major contributions to modern architecture and furniture. “Yusuf” is Arabic for “Joseph.” In the Bible, Joseph was known not just as a dreamer but as a dream interpreter. These gifts brought him fame and recognition as well as misfortune. Stephen Miles is Cobb’s father-in-law. Stephen’s wife, Marie Miles, looks after Cobb’s children.

APPENDIX

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Robert Fischer may reference chess champion Bobby Fischer. The name may also reference the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, whose kingdom physically changes to parallel his wounds. Maurice Fischer is likely homage to graphic artist M. C. (Maurits Cornelis) Escher. The names of the characters— D om, R obert, E ames, Arthur/Ariadne, M al, Saito—spell dreams. Phillipa and James, Cobb’s children, were played by two sets of child actors; one set for the end of the film, one set for the rest. They wore different clothes. Younger (dream) three-year-old Phillipa was played by Claire Geare. She wears a short-sleeved pink dress with a two-inch pleated frill trim at the bottom and brown shoes. Older (end of the movie) five-year-old Phillipa was played by Taylor Geare (Claire’s older sister). She wears a pink dress with shoulder straps that has an eight-inch pleated frill trim at the bottom and a waistband design. She is also wearing a white T-shirt underneath the strapped dress and pink tennis shoes. Younger (dream) twenty-month-old James was played by Nolan’s son, Magnus. He wears a short-sleeved plaid button-down shirt that contains reddish-orange, brown, and yellow vertical stripes, khaki shorts, and brown sandals with no socks. Older (end of the movie) three-year-old James was played by Johnathan Geare (brother to Claire and Taylor). He wears a short-sleeved buttondown plaid shirt that contains red and brown vertical stripes. He is wearing dark khaki shorts and white tennis shoes.

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Exiting limbo: When Fischer and Ariadne awake from Limbo they only go one dream level up, to the Snow Fortress. According to Cobb, he and Mal entered Limbo when experimenting with multilayered dreaming. Wouldn’t they have simply gone one layer up, to a lower level of their original multilayered dream, when they exited Limbo? Perpetual spinning top: At the beginning of the film, elderly Saito spins the top. We flash back, and spend the rest of the movie getting back to elderly Saito . . . and the top is still spinning. When the top spins and doesn’t fall, we are in a dream—and the top was spinning the whole movie! One-dimensional characters: The other characters are all too onedimensional for Inception to be a good movie. Ariadne, Eames, Arthur, Saito don’t even have last names. This makes perfect sense, however, if they are all projections of Cobb’s subconscious. Dream jumps: There are many editing jumps in the real world that mirror those in dreams. During Cobb and Mal’s first conversation in the film, they jump mid-sentence from inside to outside. A similar jump is seen during Cobb and Ariadne’s first conversation. In Paris, Cobb stands outside Miles’s classroom. Suddenly, without opening the door or making Miles aware of this presence, Cobb is sitting in the classroom. Another “dream cut?” “Come back to reality”: Cobb’s father-in-law, Miles, implores him to do so when Cobb reveals that Mal won’t let him design dreams anymore. PASIV absurdity: How the PASIV Device works is absurd; you can’t control the brain through the arm in the real world. Even how the device hooks into the arm is always just out of frame. Dream forging in The Real World : In Mombasa, Eames produces forged poker chips out of thin air. The script specifically says he was down to “his last two chips”; he loses them but then “mysteriously produces two stacks of chips.” Cobb even recognizes them as forgeries. “I see your spelling hasn’t improved.” Is Eames “dream forging” in the real world?

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Dream forging in The Real World : In Mombasa, Eames produces forged poker chips out of thin air. The script specifically says he was down to “his last two chips”; he loses them but then “mysteriously produces two stacks of chips.” Cobb even recognizes them as forgeries. “I see your spelling hasn’t improved.” Is Eames “dream forging” in the real world ? Mombasa chase: The chase scene in Mombasa has many dreamlike elements. The overhead view makes it look like a maze. Agents (projections?) are around every corner, and pop out of nowhere. Cobb can’t stop the restaurant owner from drawing attention to him. As he runs away, the walls close in around him, and Saito appears out of nowhere to rescue him. Cobb/Cobol: The company chasing Cobb is named “Cobol.” The similarity indicates he might be chasing himself. Magic newspaper: As the team plans the inception, the newspaper articles in Cobb’s folder about Fischer and his father change without Cobb turning the page. Cobb’s addiction: Cobb can’t sleep or dream unless he is hooked into a PASIV Device. Is he addicted, or could it be that he can’t sleep or dream or his own because he is already sleeping and dreaming? Mal’s call: “You know how to find me. You know what you have to do.” Mal continually says this to Cobb in his dreams. Is she calling him down into Limbo, or to commit suicide to find her up above in reality? Ariadne’s step: While in Cobb’s memories, Ariadne steps on the champagne glass just like Cobb did. Is this because she is Cobb—or, at least, a projection of his subconscious?

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Mal’s jump: Before Mal jumps, she is oddly in the window of another room opposite Cobb, instead of on the ledge outside their suite. (She is not in the suite’s bedroom; the same living room furniture is behind them both.) Cobb doesn’t seem to recognize the oddness, as he motions for her to come toward him, across the empty space between them, to come back inside. “It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” Fischer’s training: Fischer’s subconscious is trained and attacking the team, yet Fischer’s training didn’t show up in Arthur’s research. Was Arthur not diligent enough, or is the team actually in Cobb’s dream, and it’s Cobb’s subconscious that’s attacking them (just like Mal does)? After all, the attacking projections show up at the same time the menacing train does, and we know the train is a projection of Cobb’s subconscious. Forged theft: In the hotel dream, Eames (as the sexy blonde) lifts Fischer’s wallet without actually touching him; it seems he just forges the wallet and gives it to Saito. No big deal; they are dreaming, after all. However, Eames also lifts Fischer’s passport, in the real world on the plane— yet he clearly has no opportunity to do so. Watch closely; Eames’s hand only touches the back of Fischer’s arm—but then poof , he has the passport. Is this more real world dream forging? Inexplicable paintbrushes: At the end of the film, when Cobb spins his top, the number of paintbrushes in the glass inexplicably multiplies. Cobb’s kids: At the end of the film, even though Cobb’s children are older, wearing different clothes and played by different actors—they are still in the exact position he always dreams them in. In addition, they say they are building “a house on the dream elements still popping through?

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REFERENCES

-INCEPTION AND PHILOSOPHY, BECAUSE IT’S NEVER JUST A DREAM, 2012 DAVID KYLE JOHNSON

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS: RUTH TALLMAN JASON SOUTHWORTH ANDREW TERJESEN JAMES.T.MILLER DAN WEIJERS BART ENGELMAN ADAM BARKMAN JOHN.R.FITZPATRICK KEN MARABLE MICHAEL.J.SIGRIST KEITH DRUMM CLINT JONES TYLER SHORES

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